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Question:

What keyboards do they use in japan?

I'm curious what kind of keyboards people in japan can use. Since japanese uses characters, not letters, it seems like it would be hard to make a keyboard that could write whatever they wanted without it being huge.

Answer:

It uses the same letters, although some of the symbols are shifted around. You can use a qwerty (normal western style) keyboard to type in Japanese, much the same way a lot of Japanese keyboards type. For example, if you type ka, the computer will automatically convert that to the Japanese character か, pronounced and romanized the same way. After you type out a word, you can choose which kanji to change it to (if it needs to be changed) or change it to katakana, which in the above example, か would change to カ. I hope that helped you.
Having been there, from memory their keyboards look like here but each key has Japanese characters as well.
Here's the Japanese Keyboard. euc.jp/i18n/jpkbd.en.html
The alphabet is put in qwerty design, but after switching to the Japanese mode, it becomes phonetic and translates it into the hiragana. You can then use another key to change the hiragana into kanji, which is basically a drop down list of all the possibilities for that combination of kanji. I'm using a Japanese keyboard right now, the @ key is in a different place, as are a few other characters such as that. NOTE: I thought I answered that. They are basically standard qwerty keyboards with a few of the special characters moved around. So, yes, they do look like normal keyboards.
The Japanese use a modified English qwerty layout. It looks almost exactly like a American/English Keyboard, except it has some minor changes and some japanese characters. All character conversion is done via SOFTWARE not the hardware. A regular english keyboard can type Japanese as well. I use a regular keyboard to type in Japanese just fine. Here's a photo of a typical Japanese keyboard:

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