How to setup Japanese on an English Windows system

"Locale" means current location. In computers it refers to the location/culture specific settings the user wants to use. The support for "locale" depends on the application. Some applications are smart enough to change their interface into different languages based on the Windows locale settings. (Most, however, are not,  so don't worry about everything turning Japanese.)

1. Go to the Windows Control Panel and select "Regional Options".
2. From the "General" tab, set "Your locale" to "Japanese" IF you want to use Japanese times/dates etc only in applications that recognize the current locale (Windows and Office do use this value, so for example your Windows clock would display in the Japanese format).
3. Still on the "General" tab from the "Language settings for the system" box, check all the languages you want to use. IF you want to use Japanese filenames you need to press the "Set default..." button and select "Japanese". This is good for backwards compatibility with older Japanese software.

An "IME" is an "Input Method Environment". Basically a program which facilitates entering Japanese into the computer. With English we are lucky because all we have to do is press the button and the character appears (in some cases the shift key for those whacky big letters, bad pun warning). Japanese and a few other languages require entering characters with multiple key presses and selecting from a drop-down list of choices. Sometimes you might even enter a Japanese kanji character by drawing it with the mouse. All made possible by the "IME".

1. From the Control Panel "Regional Options" go to the "Input Locales" tab.
2. In the "Installed input locales" box click "Add..." to add new IMEs.
3. Select Japanese for BOTH "Input locale" and "Keyboard layout/IME" then press OK.
4. Optionally you may want to select "Japanese" from the "Installed input locales" list and "Set as Default".  Simply press "Alt+`" (upper left, under the "~") or the hankaku/zenkaku key on a Japanese keyboard to switch between English and Japanese while staying within the Japanese IME.

The Japanese IME defaults to a Japanese interface, but that can be fairly confusing to people just learning the language.

1. Still in the "Regional Options" menu select the Japanese Input Language from the list so it is highlighted and click the "IME Settings..." button. You can also right-click &rAr; Properties... on the current locale icon (red dot with brush) to get to the settings screen.
2. On the first tab in the lower right-most corner click the combo-box to select the English interface. Then click OK and come back to enjoy the easy to read options.
3. The "Toolbar" tab provides probably the most useful settings. Check all the buttons options. And I like the "Display in taskbar" option since it gets rid of the floating toolbar unless you really want it. Also checking the "Hide for direct input mode" can avoid having the toolbar displayed when inputting Japanese. If you want to see the tool bar for mouse input etc, left-click the icon next to the "red dot" with the "A" or "hiragana/katakana あ" character then select "IME Pad".
4. Once the "IME Pad" is displayed click the text next to the upper left icon. (It may still be Japanese) From this pulldown text you can select the various input styles including: ソフトキーボード (software keyboard), 手書き (hand/mouse written recognition), 文字一覧 (list of all characters in set), 総順画数 (stroke count), 部首 (bushu/radical lookup)

Using the IME can be a bit tricky at first. The main idea is to enter the phonetic romaji reading of the Japanese characters and then by pressing spacebar cycle through a list of choices until you read the one you want. (or you can just press the # of the choice in the list if you remember it) Hiragana mode is usually a good mode to leave the IME in for Japanese. Some useful keys include:

Alt+`	Toggle between English and Japanese within Japanese IME
F6	Convert currently underlined stuff to hiragana
F7	Convert to katakana
F8	Convert to halfwidth-katakana (not very useful)
F9	Convert to fullwidth-english (not very useful)
F10	Convert to regular English characters