|
| Ebisu beer label with the name written as webisu. |
Although kana for wi and we exist, namely hiragana ゐ and ゑ, and katakana ヰ and ヱ, these kana are not used in modern Japanese. They were used in historical kana usage but not to represent the sounds "wi" and "we" but the sounds now represented by i and e.
One archaic system of representing the English "v" sound used dakuten marks on the wagyō katakana. This system is represented in Unicode: ヷヸヹヺ. There is no kana for "wu", so this element is missing from the list.
Modern Japanese either uses the bagyō, (ba, bi, bu, be, bo to represent the v sound or ヴ (katakana u with a dakuten) plus small vowels, thus "ヴァイオリン" for violin.