If you’ve never seen a Japanese keyboard, you might wonder how on earth the Japanese type into their computers. With a language containing over 10,000 characters, you’d think a Japanese keyboard would have more buttons than the Starship Enterprise. In this article, I’m going to give a brief overview of the basics, so if you’ve just arrived in Japan you can stop banging your head against the computer screen and start typing in English on a Japanese keyboard.

First, let’s take a look at a Japanese keyboard:

You can see that each key has both a roman character and a Japanese hiragana character. Believe it or not, very few Japanese actually type directly in Japanese. Instead they prefer to type in roman characters, romaji, and the corresponding hiragana appears on the screen as they type. To disable this auto-Japanese feature, press the “zenkaku” key that looks like the following, usually under the Escape key. This allows you to type in English without it automatically converting to Japanese.

Okay, so now you know how to switch between English and Japanese. What if you actually want to type in Japanese? How do you switch between romaji, hiragana, katakana and kanji?

Here’s an example of how I type in Japanese. Let’s say I want to write “My name is Nick.” This sentence in Japanese requires hiragana, katakana and kanji, so first I press the zenkaku key and type the whole sentence in romaji; “watashinonamaehanikkudesu” (no spaces!).

Then I press the space bar, and it automatically changes my sentence into the correct characters. Finally, I press enter to confirm it’s okay. Great!

That was easy, but what if my name were Peter Crouch, the very tall English football player?

Now we have a problem. “kurauchi” matched a combination of Japanese kanji, but for foreign names, we need katakana. So, this time we need to use the left and right cursor keys to select the mistaken word, then press the space bar and select the “spelling” we want, as you can see in this screenshot:

As you can see, typing in Japanese can be a time consuming task, but Japanese people are so used to this type-select-change process that they do it very naturally. In fact, it’s amazing to watch the Japanese typing rapidly into their cell phones with just their thumbs. The Japanese thumb will surely evolve into their most flexible body part in the next few years! Saying that however, software is improving so fast that computers are getting very good at guessing what you are typing, essentially removing the select and change process altogether.

There is so much more to Japanese keyboards, such as Microsoft’s IME software which allows to to draw a character to find it in the “dictionary”, but I’ll save that for the future, if I ever get that advanced!

For a more technical look at Japanese keyboards, visit PC Japanese Keyboards.