Here is the problem:

I own an American-made Sony Vaio laptop with the keyboard layout being American, of course. Being in Japan, they only sell Japanese keyboards. I bought a wireless USB keyboard, but I can't get Vista to recognize the keyboard layout as Japanese.

I've tried anything; any help would be seriously appreciated.

"Everything"?

http://www.google.com/search?q=japanese%...rd%20vista

There's a lot of info out there. Have you tried all that?

wait, are you actually trying to type using the "japanese layout" with the kana on the keys? why not just use the IME? even japanese people use the IME.

either way, in all previous versions of windows, you had to enable kana input as your input method in the regional and language settings control panel. I just verified this on my windows XP machine (i can't stand vista, but i can't imagine they changed the input settings THAT much), by using my standard american layout keyboard, switching to japanese, and hitting the kana input key. i can type away in kana. you can make this the permanent setting by doing the following.

head to control panel
open the regional and language settings
click on the languages tab, then the details button
under default input language, you can choose between the layouts and all that, but if you pick the japanese input of choice (IME or Natural) and click properties, you can set the input style to either romaji or kana, and whether or not you start in hiragana or katakana.

hope this helps! (use the IME... haha) ^____________^

Typing in kana isn't the problem. the US keyboard layout and Japanese keyboard layout are different.

Turns out it's Vista's problem. I have to do some registry tweaks to get it to recognize the keyboard.

Ugh.

urpwnd Wrote:wait, are you actually trying to type using the "japanese layout" with the kana on the keys? why not just use the IME? even japanese people use the IME.

No, in that search was plenty about issues with Vista and Japanese keyboards.