Translate your app into 日本語
Japanese · ~125M native speakers
Japan is the third-largest economy in the world and one of the top-spending SaaS and mobile-app markets per capita. It is also a market where English alone simply does not work — Japanese users overwhelmingly prefer to read, purchase and support in their own language, and Japanese UX conventions meaningfully differ from Western defaults.
Japanese around the world
Japanese is spoken by ~125m native speakers. It is used as an official or working language across 1+ countries and territories.
- Japan
What you gain from a Japanese locale
Japan is consistently in the top 3 countries worldwide for app-store revenue.
Japanese users reward careful localization with high retention and LTV — and punish sloppy translation immediately.
Many Western products never ship Japanese. A proper ja locale is a real moat.
Shipping Japanese on Localize.to
No regional variants to worry about — one ja locale covers the entire market.
Japanese mixes Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. Ship a CJK font stack (Noto Sans JP, Hiragino) and test line-breaking on mobile — Japanese breaks on characters, not words.
Japanese has multiple politeness levels (teineigo, keigo). Most consumer apps use polite desu/masu form; formal business tools lean further into keigo. Decide and document the register.
Family name precedes given name. Addresses order from largest (prefecture) to smallest (building). Era-name dates (令和) sometimes appear alongside Gregorian.
Common questions
For consumer products, polite form is the standard and expected register. Keigo (honorific/humble speech) is for corporate portals, customer support scripts and formal communications.
Gregorian dates are fine. Commas every three digits for numbers. Era-name dates (令和 6) are occasional in government or formal contexts — show them if your audience expects them.
As a first draft, yes — but always follow with a native review. Japanese tone is easy to get subtly wrong, and users notice.
Ready to reach 日本語 speakers?
Create a project, add Japanese as a target language, and ship your first localized build today.