"Better" depends on what you care about. _konniti-wa_ (which is the Kunrei-siki romanization of こんにちは, _konniti-ha_ is Nihon-shiki form that preserves the irregular use of は as topic-marking /wa/) and _susi-o_ (again, Kunrei-siki ignores a native script orthographic irregularity and romanizes を as _o_ not _wo_ ) are more consistent with the native phonological system of Japanese. In Japanese coronal consonants like /t/ and /s/ are regularly palatalized to /tS/ and /S/ before the vowel /i/, and there's no reason to treat _chi_ and _ti_ as meaningfully different sequences of sounds. Linguists writing about Japanese phonology use it instead of Hepburn for good reason.
Obviously, being more transparent to English-readers is also a reasonable goal a romanization system might have, and if that's your goal the Hepburn is a better system. I don't have a strong opinion about which system the Japanese government should treat as official, and realistically neither one is going to go away. But it's simply not the case that Hepburn is a better romanization scheme for every purpose.
I don't see how kunrei-shiki is useful at all. If I want to write Japanese words so non-Japanese speakers can pronounce them approximately, then Hepburn is the way to go. If I want to write Japanese words so Japanese speakers can read them best, I'll write them in actual Japanese. This isn't 1975, and computers are perfectly able to render hiragana, katakana, and kanji. What do I need kunrei-shiki for? I've been living in Japan for years now, and have never found a use for it.
But it's a reality that English is the primary (if not sole) focus, for historical reasons and as the global lingua franca. English is taught (poorly, from what I hear) in schools, played on train announcements, is the only Western language available on ticket machines, and is the assumed language of non-Asian visitors to the country. I was even on a couple of domestic flights a few days ago and the captain / FAs made announcements in English. It is not "arbitrary" at all.
Do you think Japanese people actually read and write in kunrei-shiki? No, they write using their own letters.
Romanization is an approximation that exists primarily for two purposes: 1. to express Japanese terms in other languages and 2. to enable typing Japanese on a computer. It’s silly to enforce kunrei-shiki, a system rarely used in practice, in the name of "accuracy" based on arbitrary criteria. Romanized spellings will never be accurate for obvious reasons.
Given the purpose of romanization, it’s more practical to choose a system that allows non-Japanese speakers to pronounce words more closely aligned with the correct pronunciation.
What I’m complaining about is that the romanization is based specifically on English, arbitrarily chosen from all languages that natively use the Latin alphabet. For example, what’s transcribed as “shi” is only “aligned with the correct pronunciation” for English speakers. In other languages it would be more accurately transcribed as “ši”, “szi“, “chi”, “schi” or even “si”.
If French didn't use the Roman alphabet natively, you might have a point.
At some point you might as well use Roman characters the way the Cherokee alphabet does - which is to say, uses some of the shapes without paying attention to what sounds they made in English.
And the way English generally uses the Roman alphabet (obviously excluding the zillions of irregularities) isn't that far off from how most European languages use the Roman alphabet.
I'd expect that Spanish, German and French speakers would benefit just as much as English speakers from these changes.
> And the way English generally uses the Roman alphabet (obviously excluding the zillions of irregularities) isn't that far off from how most European languages use the Roman alphabet.
Its not far off from the union of how all other European languages use the Roman alphabet, would be closer to accurate.
Sure, but the point is this isn't really making romanized Japanese more English-like. It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet. This isn't an Anglo-centric thing, it's just good common sense - unless your goal is to make it harder to pronounce your language properly, which seems like an obvious own-goal.
About 30% of people worldwide use a language that's not written in Roman alphabet.
Additionally, being written in Roman alphabet doesn't neccessarily mean it's clear how to pronounce it. Hungarians calls their country "Magyarország", but unless you know Hungarian, you will be surprised with how it's pronounced. Same as "Chenonceaux", "Tekirdağ" or "Crkvina".
Those are especially pathological cases, and not especially relevant to this discussion, as the romanization rules are explicitly designed to be consistent.
We're not talking about words like worcestershire. I'm talking about words like "bat" "monkey" "chimichanga". Those that follow the rules. There can't possibly be irregular spellings using the romanizations we're talking about!
> It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet.
There is no way "every other language already uses the Roman alphabet."
Many languages are internally consistent in how they use it, but those that are aren't consistent with each other. And then there is English, which does pretty much everything any other language which uses the Roman alphabet does somewhere, and probably a few that none of the other extant languages normally using that alphabet do with it, on top.
