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Japanese has a phonetic alphabet, called hiraganaひらがな (and katakanaカタカナ), but unless you want to look like a kindergartener, your writing should employ a lot of kanji漢字 (Chinese characters).  Kanji are non-phonetic, as they can have multiple possible readings, depending on the context, and there are thousands of commonly used characters.  To clarify pronunciation or assist learners of the Japanese language, printed Japanese will often be accompanied by furigana, phonetic characters positioned above or next to the kanji.

Some of my pages have been translated into Japanese—in most cases I try to translate at least the title (translating can be quite exhausting!)—and in rare instances some Japanese text might appear on an English-language page.  I will now be implementing furigana in most places, and it will appear optionally.  Furigana can be enabled on the configuration menu ().  See the help page for more details.