Japanese Morse Code Translator

What Is Japanese Morse Code?

Here is something most people do not know: the standard Morse code we all think of was built for 26 Latin letters. Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail designed it in the 1830s for English-language telegraph communication. That worked fine for English. Japanese, though, does not have a Latin alphabet. Japanese is written using kana syllables, and each kana represents a complete sound like “ka,” “su,” “ni,” or “ko.” There is no direct equivalent to A through Z.

So when telegraph technology arrived in Japan during the Meiji era, someone had to build a completely separate dot-dash encoding system from scratch, one that worked for kana sounds instead of letters. That system is called Wabun code (和文モールス符号, pronounced wabun mōrusu fugō). It is also sometimes called kana code. And it is still in use today, mainly in Japanese amateur radio.

Wabun code covers all 48 basic kana of the Japanese gojūon (五十音), plus voiced variants with dakuten (゛), such as が ga, ざ za, and ば ba, and semi-voiced variants with handakuten (゜), such as ぱ pa. Every kana gets its own unique dot-dash sequence of 2 to 5 elements.

One thing worth knowing: the frequency design logic in Wabun is the same philosophy Morse himself used. The most common kana get the shortest codes. The character ん (n) is the single most frequent kana in Japanese text, and it gets four dashes: ----. The kana ヘ (he) gets a single dot: ·. This was intentional engineering, not random assignment.

How to Use This Translator

Both directions work, kana to Wabun and Wabun back to kana. Here is the quick version.

If you do not have a Japanese keyboard: on Windows go to Settings, then Time and Language, then Language, and add Japanese as an input. On Mac go to System Settings, then Keyboard, then Input Sources. Or just copy Japanese text from anywhere and paste it in.

Hiragana, Katakana, and Romaji: Which One Should You Use?

This is something that trips people up when they first use the tool. Japanese has multiple writing scripts, and all three produce identical Wabun code output. Here is why, and how to choose.

The Iroha Poem: Japan’s Version of the A-B-C Song

If you have ever searched for “Japanese Morse code song,” this section is what you were actually looking for. Most people do not know this story, and none of the other Wabun explanations online tell it properly.

Wabun code is not ordered the way you might expect. It does not follow the standard modern kana sequence (A, I, U, E, O, KA, KI, KU…) that Japanese learners know as gojūon. The codes are ordered according to something called the Iroha order, and the Iroha is a poem. Specifically, it is a 10th-century Buddhist poem from the Heian period, attributed to the monk Kūkai, also known as Kōbō Daishi (弘法大師).

What makes this poem special is that it is a perfect pangram of classical Japanese. Every single kana appears exactly once across the poem, with no repeats. For centuries, Japanese children memorised the kana by memorising this poem. It was Japan’s version of the ABC song, a literary device that doubled as a phonetic index.

When Wabun code was developed during the Meiji era in the late 1800s, telegraph operators already knew the Iroha ordering by heart. Every educated Japanese person did. So the people designing Wabun code built the entire system around the Iroha sequence. The first kana in the poem, い (i), gets one of the shorter codes. The sequence of characters follows the poem, not the alphabet.

This is why people searching for a “Japanese Morse code song” are not wrong. There genuinely is a song at the heart of the code. A medieval Buddhist poem about the impermanence of all things became the structural backbone of a 19th-century telegraph encoding system, and it is still in use today.

The Iroha ordering was also used for centuries to number legal clauses and index documents in Japan, with I, Ro, Ha corresponding roughly to one, two, three. It is a piece of Japanese cultural DNA that happens to also be the foundation of Wabun code.

The Complete Wabun Code Chart

All 48 basic kana, their Romaji reading, and their Wabun code sequences. Grouped by gojūon rows. Click any row to load that kana into the translator above.

Wabun vs International Morse: What Is Actually Different

People often assume Japanese Morse is just International Morse with kana labels slapped on top. It really is not. The two systems were developed independently and differ in some fundamental ways.

The DO and SN Prosigns: Switching Mid-Transmission

This is something none of the other Wabun explanations online cover properly. Real Japanese ham radio operators do not just use Wabun in isolation. Sometimes a transmission contains both Japanese kana and Latin characters or numbers. When that happens, they use two special prosigns to switch between the two systems mid-message.

Real operators call International Morse Oubun (欧文) and Japanese Morse Wabun (和文). You will see these terms on Japanese ham radio forums and in JARL documentation. None of the English-language Wabun pages mention this, but it is how Japanese CW operators actually talk about the two systems.

A practical example: sending おはよう (Good Morning) in Wabun on air looks like: DO prosign, then O, then HA, then YO, then U, then SN prosign. If you wanted to add your call sign in Latin characters after, you would send SN first to switch back to International Morse.

Does Wabun Code Work for Kanji?

Short answer: no. And this is worth clearing up because a few websites claim otherwise, which causes real confusion.

Wabun code was designed for kana, the phonetic syllabary of Japanese. Kanji characters represent meaning, not sounds. There is no Wabun code for 東 (east) or 水 (water) or 東京 (Tokyo). The system simply does not encode Kanji.

When a Japanese telegraph operator or radio operator needed to transmit a word written in Kanji, they would spell it out phonetically in kana. The word 東京 (Tokyo) would be transmitted as と-う-き-ょ-う in Wabun kana codes. This is the same approach English operators use when spelling out a word letter by letter in Morse, except in Japanese you are spelling out the sounds, not letters.

This was actually a deliberate design decision and one of the elegant things about Wabun code. Because Japanese is already written phonetically in kana, and because kana captures the full sound of any Japanese word, you can transmit any Japanese text using only the 48 kana codes. You do not need thousands of separate codes for Kanji. You just spell everything out in kana sounds.

Can You Translate Japanese Morse Code to English?

People search for this constantly, so let us be straight about it: you cannot go directly from Wabun code to English in a single step. Wabun decodes to Japanese kana text. Getting to English from there is a separate job.

The two-step process is simple though.

1. Step one: decode the Wabun signals. Paste the dots and dashes into this translator and get the Japanese kana text out.
2. Step two: translate the Japanese. Take that kana text to Google Translate or DeepL and translate from Japanese to English.

Going the other way around, if you want to send an English message in Wabun, you reverse the process. Translate your English to Japanese first using Google Translate, then run the Japanese kana output through this tool.

One thing that can help as a bridge: if you set the output in this translator to show “Morse with Romaji,” you will see the romanised version of each kana alongside the Wabun code. That can make it easier to look up what each sound means if you are not familiar with Japanese.

Who Actually Uses Japanese Morse Code Today

More people than you might think. Here are the groups who use this tool and why.

Common Mistakes When Using a Japanese Morse Translator

These come up a lot, so worth knowing before you run into them.

Frequently Asked Questions