Nihon-shiki

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Nihon-shiki (日本式 "Japan-style"; also Nippon-shiki and romanized Nihon-siki in the system itself) is a romanization system for transcribing the Japanese language into the Roman alphabet. It conforms strictly to the kana writing system, and is easier for Japanese natives to compose and interpret than the more anglicized Hepburn system: however, most foreigners find it to be unintuitive to pronounce.

The system was invented by physicist Akitsu Tanakadate in 1885 and is the direct forbear of the more popular Kunrei-shiki romanization system.

The sole difference between Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki is a relic of the differences between the kana syllabary and pronunciation. In modern Japanese, the sounds of the voiced versions of the pairs si/ti し/ち and su/tu す/つ have become identical. For example, if the words kana かな and tsukai つかい are combined, in kana the result is written かなづかい with a dakuten (voicing sign) ゛ atop to indicate that the tsu つ is now voiced. Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki ignore the underlying kana and represent the sounds phonetically as kanazukai, as if the original kana had been su, but Nihon-shiki retains the difference and romanizes the word as kanadukai. This also makes Nihon-shiki the only system of romanization that allows lossless mapping to and from kana. (There is more about these spelling rules in the Hiragana article.)

The JSL system, which is targeted at foreign students of Japanese, is also based on Nihon-shiki.

See rōmaji for a comparison of romanization systems.