Jim Breen's Japanese Page is an invaluable resource for word look up, input methods, and translation. He also has several resources external to his site listed.

im-ja is the Gtk 2.x/GNOME 2.x Japanese input method I personally use. If you run Debian like I do, then all you need is to download the Debian package install it with its dependencies. You should have an up-to-date freetype font renderer to make sure you can have pretty kana/kanji fonts. You may also want to install dictionaries: xjdic, which uses kterm, or gjiten which is Gtk+ 2.x based.

Installation

     dpkg -iE im-ja_0.2-1_i386.deb
     apt-get install -u canna edict ttf-kochi-gothic

Alternatively, im-ja also has an apt-get source, so you can add the lines:

     deb http://im-ja.sourceforge.net/ ./
     deb-src http://im-ja.sourceforge.net/ ./ 

to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. Then use the apt-get command:

     apt-get install -u im-ja

to install and update in the future from apt.

Usage of im-ja in applications:

• Now right click an any Gtk+ 2.x textbox/textentry.
• Select Japanese
• Hold the Shift key and press space to cycle the input method.

To turn on UTF-8 support in gnome-terminal, you can simply change your 'Charactering Coding' on the 'Terminal' menu item to UTF-8.

Set your locale to use UTF-8:

     Set LC_TYPE to something like en_US.UTF-8
     dpkg-reconfigure locales

Making UTF-8 your default per session

Login in from GDM with a language using an UTF-8 locale for example en_US.UTF-8 ( American English UTF-8 ). All your GNOME applications will now use it by default unless specified in their preferences.

Gjiten is a Gtk+ 2.x Japanese dictionary that I'm trying out right now.

Installation

To Debian install the downloaded Debian package:

     dpkg -iE gjiten_2.0-2_i386.deb

Alternatively, Gjiten also has an apt-get source, so you can add the lines:

     deb http://gjiten.sourceforge.net/ ./
     deb-src http://gjiten.sourceforge.net/ ./ 

to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. Then use the apt-get command:

     apt-get install -u gjiten

to install and update in the future from apt.

Dictionary file setup

Dictionary files can be obtained from the ftp://ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo ftp site.

Uncompress the dictionary file, then use the command:

     iconv -f EUC-JP -t UTF-8 dictfile -o dictfile.utf8

to convert them to UTF-8 encoding and copy the utf8 dictionaries to the /usr/share/gjiten/ directory. You can read about dictionary file maintaince and more in the GNOME manual by selecting 'Manual' from the Gjiten application Help menu.

Quick script

Here's a quick command list to install the two most basic dictionaries. The author of Gjiten has scripts to download and convert even more dictionaries oh the Gjiten web site linked above. You can replace the use of the wget command with ferit of course. ;)

     wget http://ftp.cc.monash.edu.au:80/pub/nihongo/edict.gz
     wget http://ftp.cc.monash.edu.au:80/pub/nihongo/kanjidic.gz

     gunzip edict.gz
     iconv -f EUC-JP -t UTF-8 edict -o edict.utf8

     gunzip kanjidic.gz
     iconv -f EUC-JP -t UTF-8 kanjidic -o kanjidic.utf8

     cp *.utf8 /usr/share/gjiten/

I've noticed in my version I had to rename kanjidic.utf8 to kanjidic, because the program has a hardcoded preference for that filename. It seems to be just for that one dictionary file.