Hi, Volle,

I think I understand your problem, but by phonetic guide, do you mean transliteration? For example, next to the best, do you want to have "ichiban"? Or do you mean the Japanese "alphabet"? (Sorry, I know just enough about Japanese to be dangerous.) So next to the best, you have "いちばん"?

I'm guessing here: If "番" is always pronounced the same, and it and other ideographs (?) are repeated a lot, my technique would be to:
1. Copy the Japanese words into another column. (Let's call it the dummy column.)
2. Pick out an ideograph like "番" and let's say it's always pronounced "ban" (or whatever the phonetic spelling is in Japanese).
3. Select the dummy column and then do a search and replace for changing "番" to "ban".
4. Continue with other ideographs that are repeated.

By the way, I would strongly suggest put Japanese kanji (thank you for that word) in one column and the English translation in another. Others might suggest doing this in Excel rather than Word, but my experience with Excel is that it doesn't handle foreign characters (á,Æ,ß,å are a few that I deal with) as easily as Word does.

Let me know if I'm on the right track.