Hiragino Sans

What is Hiragino Sans?

Hiragino Sans (originally Hiragino Kaku Gothic) is the sans-serif font family Apple ships as the default Japanese system font on iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS. It was developed by Screen Co. (now Dainippon Screen) in the 1990s and licensed to Apple in 2002 starting with Mac OS X 10.2.

The "Hiragino" name comes from the Hiragino district of Kyoto. The font supports Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji), simplified and traditional Chinese as a fallback, and Latin characters with optical adjustments for mixing with Japanese text.

Why does Hiragino matter for App Store screenshots?

When a screenshot template uses a custom English font (Inter, Helvetica Now, SF Pro, or a designer typeface), Japanese characters in the same caption fall back to the system font. On iOS that fallback is Hiragino Sans. The result is a mixed-font caption: the English brand mark in the custom font, the Japanese characters in Hiragino, with a visible weight mismatch between them.

Three fixes work. First: use Hiragino Sans for the Japanese caption layer and keep the custom font for the English brand mark only (the two-font composition reads cleanly if the weight pairing is intentional). Second: switch to a CJK-compatible English font that ships Japanese glyphs (Noto Sans, Source Han Sans). Third: set the whole composition in Hiragino for projects without a strong typography identity.

What's the codepoint pitfall?

For ambiguous CJK characters (Han characters that render differently in Japanese vs Simplified Chinese), the font stack must explicitly declare the Japanese locale. Otherwise some characters render with Chinese glyph shapes inside a Japanese caption, which native Japanese readers spot immediately. Hiragino disambiguates correctly when the locale is declared; generic fallback fonts may not.