“Happy Birthday” in Japanese (+ 13 More Birthday Phrases)

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How do you say “happy birthday” in Japanese? The everyday answer is お誕生日おめでとう (otanjōbi omedetō). Add ございます (gozaimasu) on the end and you've got the polite version for a boss, a teacher, or anyone you'd bow to rather than fist-bump.

Birthdays are a lovely place to start learning a language, because the phrase gets used again and again, by you, for you, and you'll hear it plenty once people know you're studying Japanese. In this guide I'll give you the casual and polite versions, the loanword everyone reaches for when the birthday song starts, a bank of related phrases for cards and messages, a look at how Japan actually celebrates birthdays (and didn't, for most of its history), and the pronunciation to make it land properly. Let's get you ready for the next 誕生日 that comes up.

Table of contents

• How to Say “Happy Birthday” in Japanese
• Casual or Polite? Knowing Which One to Use
• The Loanword and the Birthday Song
• 13 More Birthday Phrases and Words to Know
• How Japan Celebrates Birthdays (and Historically, Didn't)
• How to Pronounce “お誕生日おめでとう”
• A Quick Note on the Script
• You're Ready to Wish Someone a Happy Birthday in Japanese

How to Say “Happy Birthday” in Japanese

The phrase you're here for is:

• お誕生日おめでとう (otanjōbi omedetō) – “Happy birthday” (casual)
• お誕生日おめでとうございます (otanjōbi omedetō gozaimasu) – “Happy birthday” (polite)

Worth breaking down, because each piece is useful on its own:

• お (o) – an honorific prefix, added to soften and dress up a noun. You'll see it all over polite Japanese.
• 誕生日 (tanjōbi) – “birthday”, literally “birth” (誕生, tanjō) plus “day” (日, bi).
• おめでとう (omedetō) – “congratulations”. This word does loads of work in Japanese, more on that below.
• ございます (gozaimasu) – the polite ending that turns a casual phrase into one you can say to anyone.

You'll also hear it without the お, as plain 誕生日おめでとう, which is fine among close friends but slightly blunter. Keeping the お is the safer, warmer default, and it's the version you'll see on cards and banners.

If you want the fuller foundation before you get to birthdays, our guide to greetings and basic phrases covers the everyday hellos and thank-yous that sit either side of this one.

Casual or Polite? Knowing Which One to Use

Japanese politeness levels are built into the grammar, and birthdays are a useful place to practise reading the room:

• Friends, siblings, classmates, your partner: お誕生日おめでとう. Dropping the ございます here isn't rude at all. Among people this close it's the expected form, and adding it would feel a bit stiff, like thanking a sibling with a formal bow.
• Colleagues, your boss, a teacher, or anyone you're not on first-name terms with: お誕生日おめでとうございます. The safe default if you're ever unsure.
• Writing a birthday card: either works, but ございます reads as slightly more considered when you don't know the recipient's exact age or seniority relative to you.

When genuinely in doubt, add the ございます. Japanese forgives being too polite far more readily than being too casual with the wrong person.

The Loanword and the Birthday Song

There's a second way to say it, borrowed straight from English:

• ハッピーバースデー (happī bāsudē) – “Happy Birthday”

This loanword doesn't replace お誕生日おめでとう in daily conversation, but it's exactly what gets sung. At most Japanese birthday parties, the group sings the English “Happy Birthday to You” tune, usually with the actual English words, sometimes swapped for ハッピーバースデー in the line where the name goes. So if you're at a party in Japan and the singing starts, you can join in without missing a beat, it's the same tune you already know.

One more thing: おめでとう alone just means “congratulations”, and it's used for a huge range of occasions, not only birthdays. New Year gets its own version (あけましておめでとう), a wedding gets ご結婚おめでとう, passing an exam gets 合格おめでとう. The birthday-specific part of the phrase is entirely carried by 誕生日. Learn おめでとう once and you can congratulate someone on almost anything.

13 More Birthday Phrases and Words to Know

Here's a bank of phrases and vocabulary to round out your birthday Japanese, whether you're writing a card, chatting at a party, or just want to recognise the words when you hear them.

Congratulations, more generally:

• おめでとう (omedetō) – “Congratulations” (casual)
• おめでとうございます (omedetō gozaimasu) – “Congratulations” (polite)

Wishing them well:

• 素敵な一日を (suteki na ichinichi o) – “Have a wonderful day”
• 健康で幸せな一年を (kenkō de shiawase na ichinen o) – “Wishing you a healthy, happy year”
• 良い一年になりますように (yoi ichinen ni narimasu yō ni) – “May it be a good year”

Party vocabulary:

• 誕生日会 (tanjōbikai) – “birthday party”
• プレゼント (purezento) – “present” (from the English “present”)
• ケーキ (kēki) – “cake”
• ろうそく (rōsoku) – “candle(s)”
• 願い事 (negaigoto) – “a wish”, as in the one you make blowing out the candles
• 乾杯 (kanpai) – “cheers!”, the toast that kicks off the eating and drinking

Asking about age (use with care):

• 何歳になりましたか (nansai ni narimashita ka) – “How old did you turn?”

This last one is fine among friends who already know roughly how old you are, but Japanese culture can be more reserved about stating age outright than you might expect, especially once someone's past their twenties. Read the room before you ask, the same way you would in English.

Flashcards are genuinely the fastest way to make phrases like these stick rather than just recognising them on the page. Our Anki cards are built for exactly this kind of spaced repetition.

How Japan Celebrates Birthdays (and Historically, Didn't)

Modern Japanese birthdays look a lot like Western ones. There's usually a sponge cake with whipped cream and strawberries (ショートケーキ, shōto kēki), candles to blow out, a round of ハッピーバースデー, and presents. If you turned up to a birthday party in Tokyo, you'd recognise almost everything about it.

That's a relatively recent picture, though. For most of Japan's history, individual birthdays weren't really an occasion at all. The country used a system called 数え年 (kazoedoshi, “counted years”), shared across much of East Asia, where a baby is considered one year old at birth and everyone, regardless of their actual birth date, gains a year together on New Year's Day. Your age moved in step with the whole country, not your own personal calendar, so there was no real reason to mark a single birthday.

Japan had legally switched to 満年齢 (man'nenrei), the Western-style system where you age on your actual birthday, as far back as 1902, but daily life carried on counting the old way for decades. It took another law, in force from 1950, actively telling everyone to use the Western count for the change to stick. Since then, birthdays have steadily become the personal celebration Japan knows today, cake, candles, and all.

A handful of ages still get special recognition beyond the usual party. The best known is 還暦 (kanreki), the 60th birthday, which marks a full 60-year cycle of the traditional zodiac calendar, symbolically a “return” to the year you were born. It's traditionally celebrated by giving the birthday person a red vest and cap (赤いちゃんちゃんこ, akai chanchanko), red representing rebirth. Later milestones have their own names too, such as 古希 (koki) for the 70th and 米寿 (beiju) for the 88th, though kanreki is the one you're most likely to hear mentioned. If you want to be able to name any of these ages confidently yourself, it's worth locking down numbers in Japanese early, they come up constantly once you start counting candles and years.

How to Pronounce “お誕生日おめでとう”

Six syllables, well, morae, in the first word and five in the second, and both share a sound that trips up learners: the long ō.

• お誕生日 (otanjōbi) – broken into its beats: o-ta-n-jō-bi. The じょう part is a long “o” sound, held for roughly twice as long as a short one. Say it as “oh-tahn-JOH-bee”, letting that middle “joh” stretch out a beat longer than feels natural at first.
• おめでとう (omedetō) – o-me-de-tō. Same trick on the last syllable: とう is a long “o”, not a short one, so the word ends “toh”, drawn out, rather than a clipped “to”.

Two habits help most. First, Japanese vowels are pure and consistent, a is always “ah”, i is always “ee”, never the sliding diphthongs English vowels do. Second, every mora gets roughly equal weight, Japanese doesn't stress syllables the way English does, so resist punching one part of the word harder than the rest. Get those two right and お誕生日おめでとう will sound natural fast.

If you want to hear this said properly by native speakers and build your ear from there, JapanesePod101 is a solid resource for exactly that kind of listening practice.

A Quick Note on the Script

You'll notice お誕生日おめでとう mixes two different scripts in one short phrase. 誕生日 is written in kanji, the characters borrowed from Chinese that carry meaning directly. お and おめでとう are written in hiragana, the rounded, curvy script used for grammar particles, word endings, and native Japanese words that either don't have a common kanji or are simply written the easy way. Then there's ハッピーバースデー, written in katakana, the more angular script reserved almost entirely for loanwords borrowed from other languages. Spotting which script a word is written in is actually a handy clue while you're still learning, kanji usually means “core meaning”, hiragana usually means “grammar or native vocabulary”, and katakana usually means “borrowed from abroad”.

You're Ready to Wish Someone a Happy Birthday in Japanese

You've now got the casual phrase, the polite one, the loanword everyone sings, a bank of related phrases and party vocabulary, the cultural backstory, and the pronunciation to say it properly. That's genuinely enough to handle a birthday message, a card, or a party in Japanese without hesitating.

The real skill is being able to use the phrases you already know in a real conversation, with a real person, at normal speed. That's exactly what we build inside the Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp, where you're speaking Japanese with real people from day one instead of just collecting phrases on a page.

So next time someone's 誕生日 comes round, you'll know exactly what to say. お誕生日おめでとうございます!