This site contains information for using Japanese on a Macintosh. It is aimed at students, teachers and others who use a Mac predominantly for English, but also want to read, write, browse, and email in Japanese. The emphasis is on simple, less expensive software that is readily available. This front page contains information on activating Japanese support globally in the Mac OS. The pages underneath this one focus on specific tasks and applications: email, web browsing, dictionaries, etc.
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I am a professor of Japanese at Williams College. Many years ago I worked briefly as software developer, and I've been using Apple computers since the //e days. The programs I use most often are indicated with this icon: 
I've tried most of them on a wide range of systems over the years, most recently a MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard). If you have questions or comments about this site, please feel free to email me at bolton at redcocoon.org.
This page was last updated on 6/2/08 .
Compared with the early days, using Japanese with the Mac is now relatively seamless. Mac OS comes installed with support for reading and editing Japanese--in documents, in email, and on the web. Support for Chinese, Korean and other languages is also included. If you receive Japanese email in Apple's Mail application or go to a Japanese web page in Safari, the Japanese will probably display correctly without your doing anything special or reading any further on this page. If this does not work smoothly, if you want to enable additional features in these programs, or if you want to input Japanese text (to create documents, do web searches, or send email in Japanese, for example), you'll need to take some extra steps. These are described below, and on the other pages of this site.
To enable input in Japanese or other Asian these languages, click on the international icon in the System Preferences, and select the Input Menu tab (Apple Menu > System Preferences > International > Input Menu tab). Now check the box next to the languages you want to use. The Japanese input method is called kotoeri (from a classical Japanese word meaning to choose one's words). Also check the option to show input menu in menu bar. Click the images below to enlarge them and see how to do this.
You can now use the menu below (which now appears in the upper right of the menu bar) to select the language and alphabet you want to type in.
Here's an optional tip: there is a keyboard shortcut to switch between languages without using this menu. It is Apple-space bar. Unfortunately, it does not work in recent versions of Mac OS, because the same shortcut is assigned to Spotlight. If you want to fix this conflict, click on Keyboard & Mouse in System Preferences, select the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab, and uncheck the Spotlight shortcut or reassign one of the conflicting shortcuts, as shown below.)
You can now input Japanese in a range of applications. If you don't know how to input text in Japanese, there are a few hints below, under Inputting Japanese, to get you started.
In Mac OS 9--and that includes the Classic Environment that runs older applications within OS X on older PowerPC Macs--you can read and write use Japanese, but you need to take extra steps to make sure these are included when you install or upgrade the system. If you need some guidance on how to install these options on an older Mac OS 9 machine (using the OS 9 install CDs), Nisus Software site has an illustrated guide. If you want to install Japanese into the classic environment of a Power PC OS X machine, use the "Install Language Kits" utility you can find on the hard drive in Applications (Mac OS 9)/Apple Extras/Language Kits. None of this is an issue with the most recent intel-based Macs, since they do not run OS 9 or the classic environment, and so do not support OS 9 applications. Mac OS 8.5 contained support for browsing the web in Japanese; Apple's Japanese Language Kit used be sold separately, and allowed you to write in Japanese with these systems (or read and write with even earlier systems).
Once you have enabled the kotoeri input method as shown above, you can select Hiragana or Katakana from the input menu in the upper right of the menu bar in almost any application. (For more on Japanese text-editors and word-processors, see the Japanese Word Processing page on this site.)
For help with the mechanics of entering Japanese text, Helen DeWitt's Multilingual word processing page includes a helpful tutorial aimed at beginners. It was written for the multilingual word processor Mellel, but it can be used with any application. (For the nostalgic, the Japanese Input Method Guide Apple produced for its first Japanese systems, written in side-by-side English and Japanese, is still available at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50037; but it is not much help with recent systems.)
For the finer points of entering Japanese, you can refer to the kotoeri help. Starting with Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), this is finally available in English as well as Japanese--which you get seems to depend on whether you've set the Finder's menus to Japanese or English, as described below. But the help is arranged as an alphabetical FAQ rather than a tutorial, and it is oriented toward people who already have some familiarity with Japanese input and systems, so I am afraid it is not much use for beginners.
To access this, pull down the input menu when hiragana or katakana is selected, and you'll see kotoeri help among the options.
Most users enter Japanese by typing the pronunciation in roman characters, so you do not need a special Japanese keyboard. If you have a Japanese a keyboard, it has a few extra keys you take advantage of, as well as the option of dispensing with rômaji and having each key map to a specific kana character. If you are using a Japanese keyboard or laptop, select the correct keyboard layout and rô or kana input method in the kotoeri preferences, on the menu shown above. (Thanks to Tom Gewecke's Multilingual Mac blog for this tip.)
To enable Japanese menus in the Finder and other applications, go to the Apple menu > System preferences > International > Languages. Add Japanese to the list of languages, if it does not appear there already. If you drag Japanese above English in the list, the finder and many other applications will open next time with Japanese menus. Even if you do not want Japanese menus, make sure Japanese appears somewhere in your list of languages. Just having it there unlocks Japanese features in certain software, like Japanese encoding in Apple's Mail application.
If the Japanese menus make things hard for you in certain applications, you can set the language of specific applications individually using the following method: First, select the application's icon in the finder and choose "Get Info"from the File menu.
Expand the Languages section of the Get Info window, and you'll see the languages available for the application. If you check Japanese and uncheck English, you will get Japanese menus; if you check English and uncheck Japanese, you'll get English menus. If both are checked, the language is determined by the order of languages in the International Preferences Pane.
Microsoft Office applications have special features for dealing with Japanese, but they are not activated by default. To activate these features you need to use a program called the Microsoft Language Register. (It should be in the Microsoft Office folder under "Additional Tools"; if not, look for it on your Office install CD). Different versions of the Language Register work slightly differently; just open the application and it will give you instructions. ONce these features are enabled, the applications will have new menu and preferences options for working with Japanese.
Note that this does not change the menus and interface elements to Japanese; for that follow the procedure above under Choosing English or Japanese Menus in Applications.
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