Most Japanese people use a so-called JIS keyboard on which 50 Japanese characters are printed in addition to 26 alphabets, numbers and special characters. It is so muddled and ugly because 2 to 4 characters are printed on each key top that I hate to use it. As Japanese language has 50 pronunciations, we can input any of them directly by hitting one key top, but as far as I know, few people are using it in this way. It is too complicated to remember all of the 26 plus 50 character's position. We usually use Romaji input method instead. In this method, each 50 character can be input by the combination of two alphabets and therefore we don't have to remember the 50 character's key position. We only have to remember the 26 alphabet position as most Western people do. What I want to say here is that the 50 characters printed on the JIS keyboard are useless for most people and most Japanese are still using the keyboard. As I am facing towards computers most of my time every day, it is a very important problem to chose which keyboard. This picture shows my favorite keyboard. It is very simple with no Japanese characters, no function keys and no ten-keys. They are all can be input by combinations of two keys. I think this two stroke combination is not disadvantageous in terms of the input speed because we have ten fingers which can be moved independently at one time.
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