  The most commonly used Japanese alphabets are Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana.
The Kanji alphabet includes pictographs or ideographic characters that were
adopted from the Chinese alphabet. Hiragana is used to spell words of Japanese
origin, while Katakana is used to spell words of western or other foreign
origin.
  Two methods are commonly used to input Japanese to the computer. One, the
'kana input method' that uses a keyboard having 46 Japanese iroha (or kana)
letter keys. The other method is 'Roma-ji input method', where the Japanese
letters are composed of English input from a standard QWERTY keyboard. Both the
methods have their advantages and disadvantages.
  This article analyses two inventions on inputting Japanese language through a
computer keyboard. One invention uses a standard English keyboard to input
Japanese characters, the other invention uses a standard mobile phone key board
to input the Japanese characters.
