Free Japanese OCR — 日本語 PDF to Text
Free Japanese OCR for PDF and images. Recognizes Kanji 漢字, Hiragana ひらがな, and Katakana カタカナ. Browser-based, no upload. Perfect for business docs, books,
About Japanese OCR
日本語 OCR — Japanese OCR extracts text in all three Japanese scripts: Hiragana (ひらがな), Katakana (カタカナ), and Kanji (漢字), along with Roman letters (ローマ字) and Japanese punctuation (、。「」『』). Handles vertical (縦書き) and horizontal (横書き) text layouts common in Japanese novels, manga, newspapers, and business documents.
私たちは Tesseract 5 の日本語 LSTM モデルを使用しています — 日本の新聞 (朝日新聞、読売新聞)、官報、教科書、ビジネス文書でトレーニング済み。すべてブラウザ内で処理 — 契約書、履歴書、住民票が外部サーバーに送信されることは一切ありません。完全無料、登録不要、ウォーターマークなし。
Key Features
- All 3 scripts — Hiragana (46 chars), Katakana (46 chars), Kanji (2,000+ 常用漢字 + rare 人名用)
- Vertical text (縦書き) auto-detected — novels, newspapers, traditional documents
- Furigana (振り仮名) captured — reading hints above Kanji preserved where present
- Mixed Japanese-English — common in tech docs, academic papers, business reports
- Full-width punctuation preserved — 、。「」『』（）！？
- Handles romaji (ローマ字) transliteration when present
- Browser-only — 履歴書 (resumes), 契約書 (contracts), 住民票 (residency records) never upload
How to Use Free Japanese OCR — 日本語 PDF to Text
- Step 1: 日本語の PDF または画像をドロップ (multi-page scans supported)
- Step 2: Japanese (日本語) is pre-selected as the OCR language
- Step 3: Add English as secondary for mixed documents (very common)
- Step 4: "抽出" をクリック — all 3 scripts recognised page-by-page
- Step 5: テキストをコピーまたは .docx / searchable PDF としてダウンロード
Who Uses This Tool
- 弁護士 digitising Japanese contracts and court filings
- International students extracting text from 日本語教科書 (Japanese textbooks)
- Researchers processing historical 古文書 and academic papers
- Business professionals converting 名刺 (business cards) and 会議資料 (meeting materials)
- Translators working with scanned 官報 (gazettes) and government notices
Why Choose PDF AI Tools
We've built PDF AI Tools to replace expensive desktop software like Adobe Acrobat for 95% of common document workflows — at zero cost to you. Unlike competitors who gate features behind paywalls, add watermarks, or limit file sizes, our tools are genuinely free and genuinely unlimited. Your privacy matters: files processed client-side in your browser never touch our servers, and even AI-powered features use encrypted, auto-deleting processing pipelines.
Frequently Asked Questions
手書きの日本語は認識できますか？
いいえ。Tesseract の日本語モデルは印刷された日本語のみ対応します。Handwritten Japanese (手書き) — including cursive 行書 and grass script 草書 — requires specialised handwriting models. For clean printed hiragana/katakana handwriting, accuracy may reach 50-60% but is not reliable.
縦書きと横書きは自動検出されますか？
Yes — layout is auto-detected per page. A book with mixed horizontal and vertical pages (common in 文芸書) will process each correctly. If auto-detection fails, manually select the orientation in advanced options.
Can it read manga speech bubbles?
Partially. Clean printed manga (商業漫画) with standard fonts reads at 85-90% accuracy. Hand-drawn or stylised fonts (common in indie/doujinshi) drop significantly. We have a dedicated manga OCR roadmap item.
日本の新聞の精度はどのくらいですか？
On clean printed newspapers (朝日, 読売, 日経, 毎日), 92-96% accuracy is typical. Old microfilm scans or wartime-era fonts (pre-1946 旧字体) drop to 75-85% because of glyph variance.
履歴書や契約書は安全ですか？
はい。すべて browser 内で処理されます — 履歴書、マイナンバーカードコピー、契約書、住民票などの機密文書は外部に一切送信されません。This privacy guarantee is architectural, not a policy.