Japanese on Windows XP

If you are going to be doing any planning at all, you're going to need to be able to view and type Japanese on your PC. Here's how to do it for XP. More operating systems to follow!

Click "Start", "Control Panel" (change to classic mode), "Regional and Language Options", "Languages" tab, check the "Install files for East Asian languages" checkbox in the "Supplemental language support" frame, click Apply.

Now you can read Japanese.

Click "Details..." in the "Text sevices and input languages" frame. Click "Add" in the "Installed services" frame. Click the "Input language" drop-down and select "Japanese". Click OK, OK again, then OK once more.

Now a little EN icon will appear in your task bar. Click on it, then click "show the language bar". It's a little more clean to have the EN icon in the task bar, but I prefer to drag it out onto the desktop, even if it sometimes gets in the way.

Bring up a text editor or browser and put the cursor somewhere that you can type text. This is where I always get tripped up. You can't select a language if your cursor isn't somewhere that you can enter text.

Click the EN on the language bar and change it to JP.

Now click the "A" in the language bar. You can select hiragana or katakana. If you want to type kanji, enter the hiragana and press the space bar until you get the desired kanji. Press "Enter" to accept.

There are keyboard shortcuts to for switching between English and Japanese, and I find them easier to use when writing documents.

Alt-Shift: Toggles between EN and JP.
Ctrl-CapsLock: Selects hiragana when in the JP mode.
Alt-CapsLock: Selects katakana when in the JP mode.