Japanese Morse Code Guide (Wabun)

Use the kana mapping, not a Latin-letter substitution

Wabun assigns patterns to kana. The pattern .- is イ (i), whereas International Morse reads it as A. The table below lists 48 kana, including the historical ヰ and ヱ, following the Japan Amateur Radio League reference. These are reference mappings, not an interactive converter.

Read the kana spelling before choosing marks. イロ becomes .- .-.- with a character boundary between the two groups. A Latin decoder instead reads A followed by an unsupported pattern in this site; it cannot recover Japanese just because the display language is Japanese.

Voicing, written form and a worked name

A voiced kana can be represented by its base kana followed by the dakuten mark. For ガ, the reference sequence is カ (.-..) then ゛ (..). The two groups must remain distinguishable. The handakuten for a form such as パ follows ハ (-...) with ゜ (..--.).

This table uses katakana labels. Hiragana spelling, kanji readings, small kana and voiced characters require deliberate normalization in a converter. This page does not guess a kanji reading. The long-vowel mark ー has its own pattern .--.-; a typographic line in a source is not necessarily a Morse dash.

Check a complete reference example

カナ spells ka-na. The signal below contains two groups: the first represents カ, and the second represents ナ. Compare each group against the kana chart before listening. Digits use the familiar International numeral patterns in the JARL reference.

Use the JARL source for full conventions and procedural notation. Switching the site language does not turn the main translator into Wabun mode. A copied Wabun pattern should be interpreted with its kana mapping, not silently processed as Latin text.

Wabun kana reference (48 kana)

Additional marks

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