Japanese typefaces
Japanese-language typesetting, covering hiragana, katakana, and a curated range of kanji.
67 open-source families · page 1 of 2
About the Japanese writing system
The Japanese subset covers the three writing systems used in modern Japanese: hiragana, katakana, and a curated selection of kanji. A complete Japanese typeface is one of the largest design projects in typography — there are tens of thousands of kanji in active use — and the open-source families that ship Japanese in the catalog represent some of the most substantial single-designer or single-foundry projects in the open-source library.
The catalog above lists every open-source typeface in the TypeCraft directory that ships the Japanese subset in its font files. The full list runs to 67 families, sorted by catalog popularity. Every entry links to a complete font detail page with weight specimens, designer credit, license, full subset coverage, and copy-paste CSS embed code.
If you are designing for a project that needs Japanese support, this is the right entry point into the catalog — but the work does not end here. Set the typeface in your real copy at your real reading sizes before you commit, and check that the typeface's Japanese design has the same care and craft as its Latin counterpart. The two designs are usually drawn separately, and the quality of one is not always a guarantee of the quality of the other. For other entry points into the catalog, see the full writing-systems index, the categories index, the designers index, or the curated buyer guides.