Katakana Direct

You want to see a name or a word written in katakana, the angular syllabary Japanese uses for foreign terms. There is a catch right at the input: the box expects romaji, meaning the Japanese spelling of the sound, not the English word. Type Brazil and you get a jumble of Latin letters back. Type burajiru and you get ブラジル, which is the real thing. The output updates as you type.

The mapping covers the classic gojuon table plus the common digraphs (kya, sha, cho). Two extra rules come along for free: a doubled consonant turns into the small tsu, so nippon gives ニッポン, and a lone n before a consonant or at the end of a word becomes ン, so pan gives パン. Anything outside the table passes through as plain Latin text, and there is no row for v or l, so paulo comes back as パウlオ with the l stranded.

The trick is to respell the word the way a Japanese speaker would say it before pasting it in. Swap l for r and close bare consonants with a vowel: michael becomes maikeru and gives マイケル, david becomes debiddo and gives デビッド. Long vowels are manual too, since the tool never produces the ー mark: koohii returns コオヒイ where the usual spelling is コーヒー. Sounds like fa, ti and vi are missing from the basic table. Everything runs in your browser.