Hi there.
I usually am not that stupid to find stuff out by myself, but somehow this topic is too confusing for me.
I just want to type words like “watashi” and then have it converted into kanji or hiragana for me.
I read that openSUSE 11.1 is pretty easy in this regard when it is selected during the installation, but how to do it afterwards – especially in KDE 4(.2)?
When I tried to find that out by myself, I found lots of options:
im-ja, scim, skim, uim, anthy, canna, xim, tomoe,…
That’s really overwhelming for someone who has absolutely no previous experience with CJK input on Linux.
It seems to me that scim/skim is the preferred way to achieve the solution, but scim seems to offer only GTK/GNOME integration and skim seems to be available only for KDE 3.
Could someone please be so kind to offer a fool-proof explanation how to do it?
Thank you in advance.
Really nobody typing Japanese?
For my Chinese input I’m using scim without any issues on KDE4…
As to simplest instructions, use Yast-> System -> Language and set additional language. I am not sure, but Yast should install some localization packages and modules for scim (and scim itself).
Again, I am not sure about it.
But each time I install OpenSUSE i do exactly the same procedure during the installation and never have any problems.
Hope, this will help 
YaST installed several localization packages (overall more than 100MB) but I still can’t enter kanji. Adding the Japanese keyboard layout didn’t help either. Scim is not installed and when I installed it previously I was too stupid to figure it out.
May be you should try strating it manually? What happens in this case?
I have Japanese working in KDE 4.2 without problem.
You need to do as previously advised and go into Yast and install a secondary language - that will install Skim / scim and needed fonts etc.
Once install completed and before restarting computer (this is important - if you restart things get much more tricky) go to Applications > Utilities > Desktop > Skim (not scim)
Skim will now show in the taskbar
right click and select configure
then
frontend > general scim > other
change panel program to
scim-panel-kde
& change config module to kconfig
Then go to global setup and uncheck everything except Japanese.
Expand Japanese and uncheck everything except Anthy
Go back to frontend>general scim>general
and set a keyboard shortcut (in toggle on/off) to change between your usual language input and Japanese
Now - restart your computer - skim should appear in the system tray each time you boot.
Fire up an application - such as your email app. Place your cursor in the text field and you should be able to toggle between English and Japanese without problem.