James Curtis Hepburn was an American physician, educator, translator and lay Christian missionary. He is known for the Hepburn romanization system for transliteration of the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet, which he popularized in his Japanese–English dictionary.

Hepburn romanization is the main system of romanization for the Japanese language. The system was originally published in 1867 by American Christian missionary and physician James Curtis Hepburn as the standard in the first edition of his Japanese–English dictionary. The system is distinct from other romanization methods in its use of English orthography to phonetically transcribe sounds: for example, the syllable is written as shi and is written as cha, reflecting their spellings in English.