Earlier this month in Tokyo, Unix International Inc demonstrated the first fruits of the publication one year ago of Edition 1 of its Unix System V Common Japanese Environment specifications. A number of Japanese vendors have developed and are introducing products for Japanese localisation, based on the XIM X Input Method and XIMP X Input Method Protocol, which are the basis for the standardised Japanese input method defined by Unix International. The Common Japanese Environment was defined by the Unix International International Work Group and the JLSIG Japanese Localisation Special Interest Group of Unix International. Products that comply with the standard include Unix System V.4.2, the DS series operating system sold by Fujitsu Ltd, the EWS 4800 series operating system from NEC Corp and the JFP Japanese environment of Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris. Adoption of XIMP allows for a common interface to the different vendors’ kana-to-kanji conversion front-end processors. Japanese computers use the QWERTY keyboard to input Japanese to the system: this appears as the kana syllabary on the screen, and then by various methods (such as pressing the space bar) a list of possible kanji ideograms that could represent the kana text is displayed for selection. This laborious data entry method comes in various guises – that fact in itself explains the slow pace of computer penetration in Japanese society. Vendors running a supposedly standard Unix operating system until now provided different text input methods. Unix International’s specification has enabled all input methods to talk to each other and run on top of each other’s systems. Unix International members such as Sony Corp and Fujitsu developed sample implementations of XIMP and provided them to the X Consortium as contribution software for X11.5. Vendors that are supporting XIMP include NEC, Sanyo Electric Co, Just Systems Inc (developer of the most popular Japanese word processor), Sumitomo Electric Corp, Toshiba Corp, Olivetti Japan Ltd, Nippon Sun, Fujitsu, Oki Electric Co and Sharp Corp.
