These pages contain information for Mac users who want to browse the web in Japanese and maybe add some Japanese to their own web pages. (Some of the features described require you to enable Japanese input on your computer; visit the first page of this site first to find out how.) The full site contents is as follows:
Under Mac OS X, browsing Japanese web pages typically does not require any special measures: usually you can just point your browser at a Japanese web page. (If you want to enter Japanese text, to do a web search for example, you need to enable Japanese input as described on the first page of this site.) What is described below is mostly details and extras-- differences between browsers, Japanese-related plug-ins, troubleshooting, etc.
If you know how to write HTML and you want to write your own web pages in Japanese, see the separate page on Tips for Authoring Japanese Web Pages.
You can view web pages in Japanese with any recent Macintosh web browser. Which you use is largely a matter of taste. Most also have a localized Japanese version of the browser intended for use in Japan, with menus and dialogs in Japanese. But in general, you don't need these just to view Japanese pages; the English versions of these browsers can display Japanese too.
All of the following browsers can display Japanese and other Asian languages. Most also have a Japanese version with Japanese menus, but that is not needed to display Japanese pages. (I have not included discontinued browsers like Netscape or IE for Mac.)
Some browsers, notably Firefox and Chrome, take plug-ins that extend their Japanese functionality. Usually these are free. The list below is just a sampling. To see the full range of what is available you can go to the Firefox Add Ons Page or the Google Chrome Extensions Page and search for terms like "Japanese," "translate," "furigana," or whatever interests you. Here are a few examples:
will let you paste a URL or Japanese text into a dictionary window and then generate a word list for the site. Some of these sites offer translations from English into Japanese or Japanese into other languages, and all have instructions in English.In order to display a Japanese page correctly, the browser needs to realize that it is a Japanese page and figure out which of several possible encodings are used to represent the Japanese characters. If your system is Japanese enabled and your browser supports Japanese, you should be able to read the sentence below:
日本では、いわゆるポストモダンという時代は、１８世紀にもう既に終わりました。
However, if the browser is confused, it will not display the Japanese correctly, and instead of Japanese characters you will get a series of nonsense marks like this:
ìñÇÇÕÅAÇÇÇÇÈÉ|ÉXÉgÉÇÉÉìÇÇ¢ÇéûëÇÇPÇWê¢ãIÇÇÕÅAÇÇäÇèIÇÇËÇǵÇÅ
Whenever a page does not display correctly, tell the browser the page is in Japanese by selecting a Japanese encoding, using the following steps. Instructions are given for the Safari and Firefox browsers, but the process is similar with other browsers.
Pull down the "View" menu and select the following menus in sequence: Character Encoding, then Auto-Detect, and then Japanese (or Universal).
If that doesn't work, you might want to try selecting one of the other Japanese or unicode encodings, like Shift-JIS, EUC, or UTF-8 from Character Encoding > More Encodings > East Asian (or Unicode) . You can keep the encodings you need most often on a more easily accessible submenu. Add things to this menu with the "Customize List..." item. Note that Japanese pages may be encoded either with the encodings labeled as Japanese or with unicode; if you are curious about the difference, see the encodings page on this site.
The screen shown is Firefox 1.0, but the Encoding menu looks the same in later versions.
Pull down the "View" menu and move down to Text Encoding, then select different Japanese options until the page displays correctly. When you go on to a new (non-Japanese) page, you should set the encoding back to "Default" manually.
The screen shown is Safari 1.3, but the encoding submenu looks the same in later versions.
You may have to repeat this every time you come to a Japanese page that does not display correctly. If you run into this problem frequently, or may want to set Japanese as the default encoding. If this does not work, confirm that Japanese fonts are set correctly. Setting the default encoding and fonts is described below.
Japanese on the web is represented in several different formats or encodings. A given Japanese page might be in any one of these. (For more on what exactly an encoding is, see the page on Japanese encodings deeper in this site.) The browser needs to know the specific encoding to display the Japanese correctly. The web page should include a specification in the html about what encoding was used. If this is not present, the browser may try to guess the encoding (that's what Firefox's "auto-detect is doing") or fall back on a default encoding set the browser preferences. If all this fails to display the page correctly, the user has to specify the encoding manually using the procedure above.
Firefox's encodings menus can be a bit confusing. Notice that auto-detect-Japanese and Japanese (ISO-2022-JP) are both checked in the View menu pictured above. From what I can tell, this shows that the auto-detect feature is enabled, and that the browser is displaying the current page in ISO-2022-JP. Firefox always shows what encoding the page is being displayed in, which might be helpful in some circumstances. If you override everything and select an encoding yourself, Firefox returns to detecting the encoding itself when you reload the page or go to a new page. Chrome seems to function similarly.
Safari has fewer settings and options you can change. If you select an encoding of your own as described above, Safari will stick with that encoding when you go to future pages, until you select "default" again from the menu. Your override is persistent, unlike in Firefox where it only lasts for the current page. This is likely to cause problems; it seems like a poor design choice. It was still not fixed as of Safari vers. 4.
If you are still having trouble displaying Japanese pages, you might want or need to change some of the browser's preferences. To access these preferences in Safari 4, choose Preferences and then "Appearance" to get the first pane below. To access these in Firefox, choose Preferences from the Firefox menu, then select the "Content" pane, look under "Fonts" and click on the "Advanced" button to get to the second preferences pane shown below. (The same preferences are available in earlier versions of Firefox and Safari, but they are in slightly different places.)
If you find you often have to tell the browser the encoding when you view a Japanese page, you can set the default encoding to a common Japanese encoding like Shift JIS. The browser uses this default encoding when it cannot determine the page encoding from other information. Choosing a Japanese encoding for English pages might make them display with little quirks, so choose an encoding that makes the majority of pages you view look right.
If you are still having trouble displaying Japanese pages (if none of the encoding choices result in readable Japanese on several different pages), it is possible that the browser does not know what fonts to display Japanese-encoded pages in. (An encoding is not the same as a font; for more on the difference, see the Japanese encodings page on this site.) The fonts only have to be set once, and usually they are already set correctly in the browser; some browsers like Safari don't let you access or alter the settings at all--if Safari thinks the page is in a Japanese encoding, it will automatically display it in Japanese fonts. In Firefox, select Japanese from the top pop-up menu, as shown, and make sure Japanese fonts are selected for all the options. You can also use this to select prettier Japanese fonts to make Japanese display more nicely.
If you want to write Japanese web pages, I have another page with tips for adding Japanese to your own web pages.
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