Nihonto Club

This site uses Japanese characters extensively. Many computers with English or other Western operating systems don't show them by default.

If you see boxes, question marks in following text:

日本美術刀剣保存協会

you still do not have support for Japanese characters. In this case please follow instructions below to enable Japanese language support:

Windows 95, 98, ME and NT

Your system should offer to download Asian fonts by default while viewing pages in those languages, just as long as you're using Internet Explorer.
Otherwise, update your system manually with these language support packs: Microsoft Global IME (Input Method Editor) 5.02 for Windows 95, 98, and NT 4.0

Windows 2000

Instructions for Windows 2000

Windows XP and Server 2003

The Windows CD-ROM is needed while installing support for East Asian languages. (Non-East Asian localizations only)

Instructions for Windows XP and Server 2003

Windows Vista

Windows Vista includes proper support for Japanese characters by default. You can actually type in Japanese or view Japanese with the default tools.

Mac OS X

By default all necessary fonts and software are installed in all versions of Mac OS X from 10.2 (2002) and higher.

For Mac OS X 10.1 multilingual software updates are available as free downloads from Apple's website. The Asian Language Update will install support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Mac OS X Language Support Updates at apple.com

Fedora Core

Install the appropriate ttfonts packages.

For Fedora Core 3, the packages are ttfonts-zh_TW (traditional Chinese), ttfonts-zh_CN (simplified Chinese), ttfonts-ja (Japanese) and ttfonts-ko (Korean). For example,

yum install ttfonts-ja
As of Fedora Core 4, you need fonts-chinese, fonts-japanese and/or fonts-korean.

Debian GNU/Linux

Installing the ttf-kochi-mincho package will add support for displaying Japanese text in the Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu distribution. You can do this with the following command:

apt-get install ttf-kochi-mincho

Gentoo Linux

Install a Japanese font package. The most common is ja-ipafonts.

emerge media-fonts/ja-ipafonts

Unicode Japanese Fonts

List of free Japanese fonts

See also:

How to Install and Display Japanese Kanji
Japanese-language Characters @ Wikipedia.org