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Rōmaji is an early system of romanization, named by James C. Hepburn, the Philadelphia missionary who arrived in Japan in 1859 and compiled the first modern Japanese-English dictionary. Today, romaji is the most widely used transcription for Japanese characters in both in the West and in Japan itself (example below).
 Other forms of romanization have been devised to address some of the drawbacks of Rōmaji including ‘Roomadi’ Nippon shiki romanization), and ‘Roomazi’ which is from the kunrei shiki system promulgated in the 1930's through a cabinet order or ‘kunrei.’ The Japanese government did much to try to further its use. Older Japanese are familiar with the kunrei shiki. Some of the challanges with the current use of Rōmaji are:
- No one single system satisfies all users. Even various official agencies of the Japanese government use different romaji transcriptions simultaneously.
- While Hepburn romaji initially makes it easy to learn how to approximate the sounds of Japanese, it has been strongly denounced by some scholars for distorting the actual forms and sounds of the language.
- On the internet the distinction between ‘Hepburn’ and kunrei romaji have become blurred in favour of a mixed approach, made possible by the way computers can respond with a correct character to incorrect inputs. Thus, romaji ‘chi, ti, tsi’ and ‘ci’ and will all yield the same kana character even though only ‘ti’ and ‘chi’ conform to known systems.
- The QWERTY keyboard does not come with diacritical characters used in romaji for lengthening vowels.
The International Standards Organization has now put Japan on notice to come up with a single, rational, unified system of romanization.
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