I took a semester of Japanese in college. In high school, I read James Clavell's Shogun. The single Japanese I remember is "wakarimasen", from Clavell's book. IIRC, it meant "I don't understand."

I've been working with trying to get our application software to be displayable in Japanese. This is just a pain. I don't understand why it has to be so hard. We have some Japanese translated html that we needed to show up. Getting it to work was as simple as installing the Debian package ttf-kochi-mincho. It took a little digging around I understand, and a little trial and error (a coworker actually did this work, not me) to figure out which package, but once located, that was it. Japanese just works in Firefox, or in Konquerer, or whatever.

The fact that Linux fonts are a black art, VisualWorks fonts are blacker and are more of a mell than an art, eand that apparently Japanese font encoding is no walk in the light, all coming together, leaves my feeling like "I just don't understand."

One thing I did find that was a great read was this page describing Japanese and related encoding issues. It was engaging, at times humorous, and paced just right, if you enjoy encoding issues and things like that of course.