Unable to use Japanese as secondary language

Have a nice clean install of OS 11.2
I want to use Japanese as a secondary language as I have in all prev version of opensuse I have used.

I have followed the same procedure for install as previously.
I go in to yast - make sure english is set as utf8

click on Japanese as a secondary language and let it install everything.

After the install (which seems to take a way lot longer than previous versions as it downloads everything rather than installing from the DVD) I cannot launch Skim. If I go into ksysguard I can see scim (not skim) is running but cannot see my taskbar icon.
If I switch to root I can bring up the taskbar icon for scim but cannot get it to work for input.

How can I get rid of scim and launch skim instead?
How can I get this to work as user rather than root?

Is there not a KDE4 version of Skim in the works rather than the KDE3 one?

Are there any alternative to scim/skim?