This module converts Japanese text in UTF-8 (or romaji in ascii) to number, AND vice versa. Though this pod is in English and all examples are in romaji to make http://search.cpan.org/ happy, this module does accept Japanese in UTF-8. Try the code below to see it. perl -MLingua::JA::Numbers \ -e '$y="\x{4e8c}\x{5343}\x{4e94}"; printf "(C) %d Dan Kogai\n", ja2num($y)' CAVEAT DO NOT BE CONFUSED WITH Lingua::JA::Number by Mike Schilli. This module is far more comprehensive. As of 0.03, it even does its to_string() upon request. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Lingua-JA-Numbers/