Reading a Japanese document
Four things that come up on almost every Japanese certificate, and are hard to look up if you cannot yet type the word you are looking at. Free, nothing to sign up for, and nothing you type here is stored.
和暦・西暦 — Japanese era years
Type a date in either calendar. 令和7年6月1日, R7.6.1 or 2025-06-01.
The arithmetic, so you do not have to come back
An era changes partway through a year, so one calendar year can carry two era names and both are correct. The first year of an era is written 元年, never 1年.
ローマ字 — a name in Latin letters
In kana, please. The same kanji take different readings in different names, so this asks rather than guesses.
漢数字 — kanji numerals
Amounts as well as small numbers — 三十五万八千 is 358,000. Including 壱弐参拾萬, the formal forms used where a figure must not be alterable.
用語集 — the words on the page
The terms printed on Japanese civil documents, and what each one says in English.
Clean up the photograph itself
Straighten it, crop away the table it was lying on, lift the contrast and shrink the file. It runs in your browser and the picture is never uploaded.
Join, split and turn PDF pages
Join several PDFs into one, split one into pieces, turn sideways pages the right way up, or make a PDF from photographs. Also in your browser, also never uploaded.
Put your signature on a PDF
For the forms that ask you to print, sign and scan when you have no printer. Draw it once and place it. Your signature never leaves your browser either.
Read the text off a photograph
Japanese, English, Chinese or Vietnamese, as text you can copy and paste into a dictionary. This is the one tool that sends your picture to us — it is deleted the moment it has been read, and the page explains why it has to.
If you need the document itself translated
Photograph it at the counter and you get a price straight away. These tools stay free either way.