Japanese OCR API
Read Japanese documents with kanji, kana and furigana, in horizontal or vertical layout.
Result
Your Markdown or JSON shows up here.
What makes Japanese hard for OCR
- Vertical text read right to left
- Furigana above kanji
- Three scripts plus Latin in one line
Script: Kanji, hiragana and katakana.
Call it from your code
curl https://api.ocrrouter.com/v1/ocr \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OCRROUTER_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "paddle/paddleocr-vl",
"file_url": "https://example.com/invoice.pdf",
"format": "markdown"
}'Best models for Japanese text
1PaddleOCR-VLOpen-source document model from Baidu. Excellent on Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
paddle/paddleocr-vl2 credits / page2Gemini FlashGeneral vision model with strong handwriting and layout understanding at a low price.google/gemini-flash3 credits / page3Mistral OCRFast document OCR that returns clean Markdown with tables and embedded images.mistral/mistral-ocr6 credits / page