Skills on AI

Locale Ja Jp

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Use when working with the Japanese (Japan) locale (`ja-JP`) — its endonym 日本語 (日本), Japanese script, left-to-right (LTR) direction, or spoken-population data. Reference data and translation guidance (register, grammar, idiom, typography) for this specific locale; see [[locale]] for general i18n/l10n concepts (BCP 47, plural rules, RTL) that apply across all locales.

Reference data for the Japanese (Japan) locale — endonym 日本語 (日本), written in the Japanese script, left-to-right (LTR).

Identifiers

  • BCP 47 tag: ja-JP
  • ISO 639-1: ja
  • ISO 639-3: jpn
  • Script: Jpan (Japanese)
  • Region: JP (Japan)
  • Text direction: ltr — left-to-right (LTR)

Speakers (approximate)

  • L1 (native): 123,000,000
  • L2 (additional): 2,000,000
  • L1+L2 (total): 125,000,000

Base locale

This is a regional variant of Locale Ja 001 (Japanese), the base/macro locale for this language.

Pluralization

CLDR plural categories for this locale: other (1 form).

  • other — everything else (e.g. 0~15, 100, 1000, 10000, …)

See Unicode Messageformat for writing plural messages using these categories.

Translating into this locale

Apply Locale Ja 001 with the conventions of Japan.

  • Dates and eras: the Gregorian year is common in business; the Japanese era (年号) is used in government documents and forms (2026 is 令和8年). Write dates as 2026年10月17日 or 令和8年10月17日, and show weekdays in parentheses (金).
  • Currency and numbers: yen (円 or ¥); 12,500円; numbers over 10,000 use 万 and 億 in prose (1万2,500円).
  • Names and addresses: family name first, then given name; honorific 様 after the name in customer text. Addresses go from largest to smallest unit (postal code 〒, prefecture, city, ward, block); phone numbers use hyphens.
  • Tone: polite, humble, and indirect; direct refusals are softened; apologies and thanks are more frequent than in English.
  • Writing direction: horizontal left to right in UI; vertical (縦書き) for traditional documents and some publications.
  • Government style: public documents follow the Agency for Cultural Affairs' 公用文 guidelines.

Common pitfalls

  • Writing dates in month/day/year or omitting 年月日.
  • Using English honorific order for names.
  • The general pitfalls in Locale Ja 001 also apply.

Learn more

  • Locale for BCP 47 identifiers, locale-sensitive formatting, pluralization, and text-direction concepts that apply across all locales.
  • Unicode Messageformat for writing plural/selection messages correctly for this locale's grammar.
  • Agency for Cultural Affairs (文化庁), 公用文作成の考え方
  • Microsoft Localization Style Guide, Japanese (https://aka.ms/japanese-styleguide)

View locale-ja-jp/SKILL.md on GitHub