Japanese Image to Text
Free Japanese OCR — three scripts, one pass, measured at 100%.
VisionParse converts Japanese images to editable UTF-8 text free in your browser, reading kanji, hiragana and katakana together.
Japanese switches script mid-sentence — kanji for roots, hiragana for grammar, katakana for loanwords — and that mixing is the real test. Our measured paragraph did it constantly (請求書番号, ください, ドル) and read at 100% character accuracy. The claim is for horizontal text; vertical tategaki layout is a separate, unmeasured case, and we say so.
- Free · no account
- JPG · PNG · WEBP · TIFF · BMP · HEIC
- 3 MB · 3 pages
- Deleted within 1h
Drop an image to read it
JPG, PNG, WEBP, TIFF, BMP, HEIC — up to 3 MB. Your file is read on our servers in Frankfurt and deleted within the hour.
What this tool does, in numbers.
- ACCURACY
Japanese printed text read at 100% character accuracy in our measurement, scored against exact ground truth.
- SPEED
VisionParse read a Japanese paragraph in 0.44 seconds on an 8-vCPU server.
- LANGUAGES
All three Japanese scripts — kanji, hiragana and katakana — read in one pass, with mid-sentence script switches handled as written Japanese actually behaves.
- LIMIT
Vertical text (tategaki) is unmeasured: books and traditional layouts printed top-to-bottom are outside this page’s claim.
- ACCESS
The Japanese image to text tool requires no account, no email address and no payment card.
- RETENTION
VisionParse deletes free-tool Japanese files one hour after conversion.
Where the 100% character accuracy comes from.
Every figure on this page traces to a dated run on hardware we name. Nothing here is a vendor estimate.
Measured 2026-08-03
- Claim
- Horizontal Japanese mixing three scripts in single sentences read at 100% — script switching cost nothing.
- Method
- VisionParse standard recognition tier, single-threaded. Full methodology.
- Sample
- A 68-character Japanese document paragraph rendered with Japanese (kanji + hiragana + katakana)-correct Noto type through Pango (real text shaping), read through the production pipeline with the jpn language model, and scored character-by-character against the exact source.
- Measured
2026-08-03on Contabo Cloud VPS 8 — 8 vCPU AMD EPYC, 24 GB RAM, Ubuntu 24.04.4- Limitations
- Horizontal (yokogaki) print only; vertical tategaki layout has not been measured. A single synthetic document per variant is a small sample and is not a substitute for a corpus. These figures describe format behaviour, not general accuracy. A 500-document corpus run is scheduled and will supersede them.
- Contact
- VisionParse@senithu.lk
What this tool gets wrong
Mid-sentence script switching cost nothing. The hard part of Japanese OCR is not any single script but the constant switching. Kanji-to-hiragana-to-katakana transitions inside single sentences read without a single boundary error.
Vertical text is a different problem we have not measured. Novels and traditional documents print top-to-bottom, right-to-left. Our measurement is horizontal text only — if your source is tategaki, treat this page’s figure as not applying to it.
Three steps, no account.
Drop your Japanese image
A scan, a photo or a screenshot — JPG, PNG, WEBP, TIFF, BMP and HEIC are all accepted.
We read it in the right language
This page's converter runs Japanese recognition (jpn) — not English recognition guessing at Japanese (kanji + hiragana + katakana) shapes.
Take the text
UTF-8 text appears with a confidence score. Copy it or download a .txt; the file is deleted within the hour.
What this tool accepts.
| Property | Free tool |
|---|---|
| Language model | Japanese (jpn), Tesseract 5 traineddata |
| Script | Japanese (kanji + hiragana + katakana) |
| Measured accuracy | 100% character accuracy (2026-08-03) |
| Measured speed | 0.44 s per paragraph |
| Output | Plain text, UTF-8 |
| Maximum file size | 3 MB |
| Rate limit | 5 files per hour, per IP address |
| File retention | Deleted 1 hour after conversion |
| Processing location | Frankfurt, Germany |
When to use the API instead.
This page converts one file now. To convert files from your own software, the same engine runs over HTTP from Starter upward.
# same engine, from your code curl -X POST https://api.visionparse.app/v1/ocr \ -H "x-api-key: $VISIONPARSE_KEY" \ -F "file=@image.jpg" → 202 { "jobId": "c0df8e2c…" }
Use the API when
You convert more than a few files, convert on a schedule, or need results inside another system. Batch, webhooks and bounding boxes are API-only.
Frequently asked
Can it tell hiragana and katakana apart from kanji?
Yes — all three scripts read in one pass, including the mid-sentence switches Japanese does constantly. Our measured paragraph mixed all three and scored 100%.
Does it read vertical Japanese text?
We have not measured vertical (tategaki) layout, so we make no claim for it. The 100% figure is for horizontal text, which covers most business documents.
Are full-width numbers and punctuation handled?
Yes — Japanese full-width forms and Western digits both read correctly, including mixed usage like ７月 alongside 766.50.
Is the Japanese image to text tool free?
Yes — 5 files a day with no account, no email and no card. A free account raises the allowance to 100 pages a month.
Do you keep my Japanese documents?
Free-tool files are deleted one hour after conversion, and no customer file is ever used to train models.