Website SEO and Japanese characters

Image titles in Japanese are converted to long text strings in URLs. Some Wordpress SEO and image naming plugins do not recognize Japanese characters.

Still, I was advised by a Japanese website designer to name my images in Japanese for SEO.

Anyone have experience with this? Any tips on streamlining image naming in Japanese?

What exactly do you mean by "image title"? If you mean the TITLE attribute of the IMG HTML tag, you can certainly put Japanese text in it (although be careful to use the same character encoding as specified in the document's headers). If you mean the image filename, using non-ASCII characters there is relatively new and may not be compatible with all browsers. Most Japanese sites use romaji in URLs (generally Kunrei, which is the standard in Japan, as opposed to Hepburn).

Thanks for the info. Perhaps my Japanese source was advising me to use a romaji filename, but Japanese in the attribute fields?

If that's the case, I may as well use an English filename, as romaji certainly wouldn't be picked up by search engines in either language.