How do I get IE to display Japanese characters?

I’ve been to the micro$oft website, but the downloads available there are pretty arcane to me, as someone who doesn’t use a lot of MS products.

But I need the font pack (or whatever), and just in general be able to use the Japanese characters in various applications. Anyone know how to do this?

The way I always do it is like so:

  • Go to the View menu, Encoding, and make sure Auto-Select is checked.
  • Go to a Japanese website. Off the top of my head, http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ should work, if you don’t already know of a better one.
  • IE should complain that it needs to download a Japanese Language Pack to properly display the page. Let it.

Bam, you’ve got Japanese fonts. If you don’t have a way to input Japanese, then it’ll be pretty hard to write it. There’s some fancy doodads for various Microsoft programs; just pick the versions you use. Using Japanese in third-party programs is gonna depend on how those programs were written, I’m afraid.

I should also have mentioned that you do those steps from within IE.

The ‘proper way’ to do it is to go into the Regional and Language Options applet in the Control Panel and check the “Install files for East Asian languages” check box on the “Languages” tab. You will likely need the original Windows installation disks for that.

Hauky’s method should work well enough to display text in Japanese. To be able to enter Japanese, you’ll need an IME (Input Method Editor) which my method will provide.

Just a word of caution: on many Japanese sites, you’ll need to manually set IE to Japanese encoding. Japanese versions of IE will default to Shift_JIS encoding for web pages, so sites that don’t provide a coding hint will only work properly for Japanese browsers.