Ruby

極旨 {gokuuma} (extremely delicious)

Whenever possible, Latin alphabet transliterations have been placed by Japanese words. This transliteration is called ローマ字 {rōmaji} (Roman letters) in Japanese and sometimes "Romanization" in English, though pedantically speaking the letters being used are Latin, not Roman.

If your browser supports either standard XHTML 1.1 or HTML 5 {rubi} (ruby) text, the transliterations will be in small type above Japanese words. If not, the transliterations will be beside each word, in normal type, surrounded by braces.

The latest versions of the following browsers currently support displaying ruby properly:

• Google's Chrome & Chromium
• Microsoft's Internet Explorer & Edge
• Firefox
• Apple's Safari
• Opera and Vivaldi

This site's transliteration is in ヘボン式 {HEBON shiki} (Hepburn style), which is relatively easy for readers of Western languages to quickly pronounce and understand. There are other styles of romanization, including variants of the Hepburn style. Thus, you may find the same word spelled differently in other documents.

Generally, if you pronounce the vowels like Spanish or other romance languages, and the consonants like English, you will get a general idea of the Japanese pronunciation. However, you will not necessarily be comprehensible to a native Japanese-only listener. While Japanese pronunciation is not hard, it is not so easy that someone without any knowledge of Japanese can mimic it just by reading a Latin approximation.

This blog will display all Japanese words in Hepburn style romanization using small letters, unless the word is a proper name. Spaces will be used before and after 助詞 {joshi} (Japanese grammatical particles).

Because Hepburn style romanization uses macrons to denote long vowels (ex. āīūēō & ĀĪŪĒŌ), it's possible that some older and small mobile devices may not be able to display due to the absence of the glyphs in the device's fonts.

While ruby text exists in Japanese and is not uncommon, it's usually written in 仮名 {kana} (Japanese syllabet) form — and called 読み仮名 {yomigana} or 振り仮名 {furigana} — to clarify difficult or ambiguous or unusual readings or occasionally 漢字 {kanji} (Chinese-origin ideographs) to suggest alternative nuances to the original words meaning.

This blog uses romanized Japanese, and not the Japanese syllabet, to make the Japanese more accessible to readers that have a casual interest in Japanese documents but do not read or write any Japanese, even ひらがな {hiragana} and カタカナ {katakana}, as well as multi-lingual search engines.

You will still need to look up the meaning of the Japanese to understand root meanings of particular words (the translations are not always word-for-word).

Knowing the meaning and reading of the Japanese documents is not a substitute for the basic Japanese requirement that 法務省 {hōmushō} (Ministry of Justice) may require of a naturalization candidate.