On 22 December 2025 Japan issued a cabinet notification that changed how the language is written in Latin letters, replacing the notification that had stood since 1954. It is the first change in roughly seventy years, and it makes Hepburn the basis: shi rather than si, tsu rather than tu, chi rather than ti, fu rather than hu, ja and sha rather than zya and sya.
If you hold a Japanese passport, none of it changes the spelling of your name, and the notification says so itself.
The carve-out is explicit
The new notification states that it does not require changes for specialist fields such as science and the arts, for personal and organisational names, or for past works and documents. For personal names in particular, the position is that the intentions of the people concerned are to be respected.
The notification declines to reach into a category where a spelling change would be an alteration to an identifier already recorded on passports, bank accounts, qualifications and published work.
Passports were never governed by that notification anyway
The coherence comes from a second instrument.
The romanisation of a name in a Japanese passport is set by the enforcement regulations under the Passport Act, which provide that the name recorded in the family register is rendered in Hepburn. The foreign ministry's stated reasoning is that a passport is a document presented to other governments, so the spelling should be the one that comes closest to the Japanese pronunciation when read by English speakers.
For seventy years, then, two different instruments deliberately specified two different systems. The cabinet notification of 1954 made Kunrei the standard, and that is what was taught in schools. The passport regulations required Hepburn. A child who learned to write their name as Sinzi in a classroom held a passport that said Shinji.
The 2025 change narrows that gap for ordinary text. It does not touch names, because names were never on the notification's side of the line.
Passport Hepburn has rules of its own
The Hepburn used in passports is not identical to the version most people know.
The clearest instance is the syllabic n. Before B, M and P, passport practice writes it as M rather than N: Shimbashi, Namba, Kampo, Temma. Elsewhere it is N. Many modern Hepburn conventions keep N throughout, so a name a romanisation tool renders as Nanba appears on the passport as NAMBA.
Long vowels are the other well-known case. The passport rendering ordinarily drops the length distinction, which is why Ohno, Ono and Oono can all correspond to names that differ in Japanese. Non-Hepburn spellings are permitted by exception, including certain long-vowel forms and spellings adopted for consistency across a family, but a first-time applicant asking for one generally has to produce documents evidencing that the spelling has actually been used.
This evidentiary requirement is the core of the policy. The spelling of your name in Latin letters is treated as a fact about your history rather than a preference, and the burden of showing it sits with you.
What this means in practice
If you hold a passport, the spelling in it is the operative one, and no reform obliges you to change it. Bookings, visas and records should match that spelling rather than what any romanisation tool produces.
If you are choosing a spelling for the first time — for a child, or on a first passport — this is the moment when the choice is cheap. Afterwards it is not, because later changes require evidence rather than a decision.
And if you are building anything that romanises Japanese, the reform changes your defaults for ordinary text and should change nothing about how you treat names. A name is a recorded value, and the source for it is the document rather than an algorithm. Our Japanese name generator produces plausible names; it does not decide how an existing one is spelled, which is the line the notification itself draws.
What the reform does change
None of this makes the reform trivial. Signage, textbooks, place names, transport systems and government publications all sit in the general category the notification governs, and those will move to Hepburn over time.
In the short term, this will likely widen variation rather than narrow it, because existing material does not have to change. Past works and documents keep their spellings. So for some years the same word will appear in both forms in circulation, with both being correct under the instrument that applied when each was written.
Where this comes from, and what will date
The change was decided in cabinet on 16 December 2025 and the notification issued on 22 December, abolishing the 1954 notification; the recommendation behind it came from the Cultural Council in August 2025. The scope limits described here — specialist fields, personal and organisational names, past works, and respect for the intentions of the parties — are the notification's own stated exclusions.
The passport rules are from the enforcement regulations under the Passport Act and the foreign ministry's published guidance, including the treatment of the syllabic n before B, M and P, and the conditions under which a non-Hepburn spelling may be requested.
We also checked a common claim: that the 2025 change puts the national standard in conflict with passport rules. It does not, and it cannot, because the notification explicitly excludes personal names from its scope. Any account that describes a new contradiction here has missed the exclusion.
The transition is the part to re-check. Textbooks and signage will move at different speeds, so which form you meet in the wild changes year by year. The division of authority is settled: names under the passport regulations, everything else under the notification, and this reform reaffirmed that rather than disturbing it.
