Start with the OCR your Mac already has. Live Text in Preview and Quick Look copies Japanese from a screenshot or scanned page with no install. For manga there is Mokuro, and for text inside apps there are a few other tools. Getting the characters out is half the job: you still want the meaning and a copy of the sentence.
Live Text first
Open the image or PDF in Preview, hold the pointer over the text, drag to select, then Control-click and choose Copy Text. That is from Apple's Preview guide. If you cannot select anything, choose Tools, then Text Selection. Quick Look works too: select the file in Finder and press the space bar.
Apple adds that Live Text is not available in all regions or languages, and points to its feature availability page. No current Apple list that names Japanese could be found, so test it on a page of yours rather than trusting a table. If it fails on a file where it should work, see Live Text not working on Mac.
It is free and fast, and for a screenshot of a tweet or a paragraph of a scanned textbook it may be all you need. It copies text. It does not tell you what a word means or keep a record of it.
Manga is a different problem
Manga text is lettered, squeezed into speech bubbles and often vertical. General OCR struggles with that, which is why people built a dedicated tool. Mokuro runs text detection and OCR on your manga pages offline, using comic-text-detector and manga-ocr, then lets you read them in a browser with selectable text. You install it with pip3 install mokuro, which needs Python 3.10 or newer, and point it at a folder of page images. The output is a file you open in its web reader.
A pop-up dictionary extension such as Yomitan can then look words up on those pages. The cost is setup: it is a terminal tool, and you read inside Mokuro's reader rather than your own app. If that is a weekend you do not have, a reader app is the other path. Kantan Manga is a free CBZ and CBR reader aimed at reading manga in Japanese, with OCR and a built-in Japanese to English dictionary. Its App Store listing says it is designed for iPad and not verified for macOS, though it lists Mac with M1 or later as compatible, and one reviewer said the OCR is not very accurate. Try it before you commit to a series.
OCR for anything on screen
If the Japanese is in an app, a video player or a PDF you cannot select, you want screen OCR rather than file OCR. OwOCR supports macOS, can use Apple's text recognition and by default reads images from the clipboard and returns text to it. meikipop reads Japanese anywhere on screen and pops up dictionary entries, though macOS support there is community-maintained and its default local engine is described as weak on vertical text. Both are terminal-installed projects.
For a scanned PDF you want to search or keep, OCR a PDF on a Mac covers making the file itself searchable. For text on screen that refuses to be selected, copying text you cannot select goes through the options.
What happens after OCR
Say the text came out right. You now have a block of Japanese and a question: what does this word mean here? The dictionary gives you eight senses. The sentence picks one.
LeafyApp is built for that step. Press ⌥A and drag a box over a line in a screenshot, a PDF page, a subtitle or an app. macOS text recognition reads that patch of screen, and an AI explains the word for the sense that sentence is using. The word is saved automatically with its sentence, source and date, so a month later you can search your library and see what you met and where.
It is a lookup tool, not a reader. It does not make a manga page selectable, and LeafyApp makes no promise about vertical Japanese text, so for a vertical manga volume Mokuro is the better route. It also reads pixels, so a very stylised font can fail. For games, use the dedicated page: Textractor for Mac.
From saved sentences to cards
Saved words can go to Anki with a card preview, one folder per deck, or out as CSV, Excel, JSON or PDF. LeafyApp also has a built-in review that blanks the word in the sentence you saved it from, scheduled with FSRS-5. If Yomitan is what you normally use and it has stopped working on something, that page lists the fixes. For the habit itself, see sentence mining on a Mac.
The picture is read on your Mac and thrown away. Only the word and its sentence go out so the AI can explain it, with nothing attached that says who you are, and your library stays on the Mac. See the privacy page for exactly what is sent.
Questions people ask
What is the best Japanese OCR for Mac? Start with Live Text in Preview or Quick Look, which is built in. For manga use Mokuro, and for text inside apps try OwOCR or meikipop. None of these will explain the word for you.
How do I OCR a Japanese screenshot on a Mac? Open the screenshot in Preview, drag over the text, Control-click and choose Copy Text. If it will not select, turn on Tools, then Text Selection. For text in an app that you cannot select, press ⌥A in LeafyApp and box the line.
How do I read manga in Japanese on a Mac? Mokuro turns scanned pages into a browser reader with selectable text, which a pop-up dictionary can then read. Kantan Manga is a CBZ and CBR reader for iPhone and iPad that also lists Mac with M1 or later as compatible.
Does manga OCR work on Mac? Mokuro runs on a Mac with Python 3.10 or newer, using manga-ocr. General OCR such as Live Text is aimed at clean text, so stylised manga lettering can come back wrong.
Can I OCR Japanese in games on a Mac? Yes, with screen OCR, though a text hook is more exact. The trade-offs are on the Textractor for Mac page.
Get the text out. Then keep the sentence.
Free while LeafyApp is in beta. One download, macOS 14 and up.
Preview, Quick Look, Live Text, Mokuro, OwOCR, meikipop, Kantan Manga and Yomitan are trademarks or names of their respective owners. LeafyApp is an independent app, not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them, and the names are used here only to describe compatibility and for comparison.