Keyboards for inputting Japanese language -A study based on US patents

Abstract

The most commonly used Japanese alphabets are Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. The Kanji alphabet includes pictographs or ideographic characters that were adopted from the Chinese alphabet. Hiragana is used to spell words of Japanese origin, while Katakana is used to spell words of western or other foreign origin. Two methods are commonly used to input Japanese to the computer. One, the 'kana input method' that uses a keyboard having 46 Japanese iroha (or kana) letter keys. The other method is 'Roma-ji input method', where the Japanese letters are composed of English input from a standard QWERTY keyboard. Both the methods have their advantages and disadvantages. This article analyses two inventions on inputting Japanese language through a computer keyboard. One invention uses a standard English keyboard to input Japanese characters, the other invention uses a standard mobile phone key board to input the Japanese characters.