A noren is the split fabric curtain that hangs in a Japanese shop doorway. When it’s up, the place is open. You duck under it without knowing exactly what’s inside, and that small moment of stepping through is the whole idea behind this site.
Japan Know How is a reference desk for the practical questions Americans actually ask about Japan. Not “the ten most beautiful temples.” More like: how is my name written in katakana, and did I get it right? What animal am I in the Chinese zodiac if I was born in late January? What year was Shōwa 45? How do I ask for the check without sounding rude?
Why we built this
Most answers to those questions are scattered across forum posts from 2011, machine translation that nobody checked, and tattoo galleries that will happily sell you a kanji meaning “cheap sausage.” The information exists. It’s just badly organized and frequently wrong.
So we did two things. We built free tools that answer the mechanical questions instantly — name conversion, zodiac years, era dates, everyday phrases — and we write articles that explain the parts a tool can’t: why the rules work the way they do, where they break, and when the “correct” answer has two correct answers.
A converter that gives you an answer without telling you how confident it is has done half the job.Our working rule
What you’ll find here
- Your name in Japanese. Katakana for roughly 900 common American given names, checked by hand against the spellings Japanese media actually use — plus a converter for anything not on the list.
- Writing and language. How the three scripts divide the work, why loanwords look the way they do, what happens to English sounds that Japanese doesn’t have.
- Chinese zodiac. Sign and element for any birth year, with the floating Lunar New Year handled properly — that late-January and early-February problem trips up most calculators.
- Japanese phrases. A phrasebook organized by situation, with politeness levels marked, because “please” in a convenience store and “please” in a business meeting are different words.
- Japanese eras. Meiji through Reiwa, converted both directions, with Western age and traditional kazoedoshi age side by side.
- Culture, travel, and food. The context that makes the rest make sense, written for people planning a first trip or a fifth one.
How we work
Three writers cover the site, each with their own beat, and every article carries a byline. We write in plain English, we show our sources when a claim is checkable, and we say “this is disputed” when it is. Where a Japanese word matters, we give it in kana and in romanization, because half of learning a language is learning to recognize it in the wild.
We also date our facts. Prices, visa rules, and rail passes change; an article that says “currently” without saying when is a trap. If you find something on this site that’s gone stale, we’d like to hear about it — that’s what the contact page is for.
Two more pages worth reading if you want to know how the sausage is made: how we check the facts covers our sourcing and correction policy, and about our tools explains exactly what the converters do, where they’re reliable, and where they’re guessing.
What we’re not
We’re not a translation service, a travel agency, or a legal or immigration resource. We don’t approve tattoos. If a decision is permanent, expensive, or crosses a border, please check with a professional who can be accountable to you — we can only give you a well-researched starting point.
The noren’s up. Come in.