Japanese Captions for Shorts

The Shorts feed is a muted, autoplaying, thumb-driven surface. A Japanese-speaking viewer lands mid-sentence and gives the video about a second. Sound is off by default and often stays off for the whole session, so on-screen text is the primary channel, not a secondary one — the hook has to be readable before it is audible.

YouTube's auto-generated captions for Shorts are a subtitle track: hidden behind a button, rendered in YouTube's style, and unreliable for many languages. Captions burned into the frame are in your font and colour, sit where you put them, and are there whether or not anyone taps CC — and they survive when the clip is downloaded and reposted to Reels or TikTok.

They also carry the middle. Retention on a Short falls off in the first few seconds, and Japanese text moving in time with the speech gives the eye something to track — a reason to stay through the setup and reach the payoff.

Japanese short-form captions are limited by character count rather than word count — around eight to twelve characters a card — and broken only at phrase boundaries, in a font with full kanji coverage so nothing renders as a box on a phone.

The transcription is the same one behind the Japanese subtitle generator: the model transcribes the Japanese audio into standard mixed script, choosing kanji where a native writer would use it and katakana for loanwords, and breaks lines at bunsetsu boundaries so nothing splits mid-word. For Shorts, the result is then split into three- or four-word cards and rendered with a font that has the full Kanji, hiragana and katakana character set, so nothing falls back to a box or a smudge at phone size.