I need to be break it to you guys, I use emacs.  But just for one little thing.Recently I've been working with a good deal of Japanese people (the company is Japanese) and I got some idea of the language, moreover sometimes I need to write something in Japanese.  I do not have a Japanese keyboard and I need to convert some form of romaji (Japanese written in latin letters).  At first I used google translated but then I learned about emacs's japanese mode.  Here is a screenshot of it:(forgive my Japanese please)emacs does this with the help of the skk dictionary with some customisations for the actual typing (lisp/international/ja-dic-cvn.el, lisp/international/ja-dic-utl.el and lisp/international/kkc.el in emacs code).  Everything happens in UTF-8, the above screenshot is emacs running inside a UTF-8 terminal.Is there a viable way to perform this in Vim?  I'm hoping someone wrote an interface to SKK already, since my Japanese is definitely not good enough to read its documentation.Or maybe, is there a different method to write Japanese text in Vim?
Can I write Japanese (SKK) text in Vim?
unicode;keyboard layout;text generation
OK, this took several days of struggle against the skk.vim plugin mentioned by @SatoKatsura.  All the documentation is in Japanese therefore I still do not know of most of its features, and, certainly, there are better ways to accomplish SKK conversion (Henkan in Japanese) in Vim than the one presented here.  Yet, it works well enough to be comparable to emacs' SKK mode.First of all you need to donwload the SKK dictionary.  Any of them would be enough but I suggests the large dictionary for the sake of completeness.  The dictionary comes in the EUC-JP encoding, therefore we need to convert it:gunzip SKK-JISYO.L.gziconv -f euc-jp -t utf-8 SKK-JISYO.L > skk-jisyo-utf-8.lIf your Vim has the +iconv feature the iconv utility should be available on your machine.The SKK dictionary is in the correct format to be used as a thesaurus, therefore we will set that in Vim and use <c-x><c-t> to perform thesaurus completion.  Every line in the SKK dictionary looks as follows:<kana entry> / <kanji entry> / <kanji entry> / ...y /  /  /Now, we only need to write the <kana entry> part and Vim will be capable of completing the rest for us.skk.vim can write in Kana in insert-mode.  It can write in both Hiragana and Katakana but the SKK dictionary has entries in Hiragana only.  Therefore we add a Toogle function wrapper around skk.vim to use either Hiragana or Katakana when in insert-mode.  When we want SKK completion we must be in Hiragana mode (this is analogous to emacs's SKK mode).Here is what I wrote in my .vimrc to wrap skk.vim and use the SKK dictionary as a thesaurus:let g:skk_initial_mode = 'hira'let g:skk_script = '~/vim/skk/skk.vim'set completeopt=menuone,previewset thesaurus=~/vim/skk/skk-jisyo-utf-8.lfunction! ToogleMode()  if 'hira' ==# g:skk_initial_mode    let g:skk_initial_mode = 'kata'  else    let g:skk_initial_mode = 'hira'  endif  execute source  . g:skk_scriptendfunctionTo enter Kana mode you press <c-j> to complete a Kanji you need to press <c-j> to exit Kana mode and then <c-x><c-t> to bring up thesaurus completion.And here is how it looks (the text is exactly the same as in the question):Disadvantages and quirks:Since we are using Vim's thesaurus we need to add spaces between words.  This is not needed in emacs's SKK becuase it keeps a selection trailing behind (see the screenshot in the question).This code is terribly hacky, I just cannot understand about 70% of skk.vim because I'm unable to read the documentation.  There certainly are better ways to perform this.You need to exit the Kana mode to perform the thesaurus completion, in Kana mode <c-x><c-t> does not work as expected.