The ground pin slides right on past the body of the adapter if you're using a cheap adapter for Europe or Australia. UK adapters are grounded anyway.
If you have one of the cheap adapters
to a US plug (the one you'd use to plug a European phone charger into an American or Japanese outlet), you can use that as a cheater in Japan.
I have no idea what the deal with the grounded adapters is. Japanese-market laptops all have 2-prong plugs since Japanese outlets aren't grounded, and you don't hear of people in Japan getting fried by their laptop bricks.
If you really hate the grounded plug, you can buy a Japanese cord online--the ground pin just goes nowhere.
Originally Posted by
jspira
I haven't had a Dell or HP in a long time but neither had a 3-prong plug when I had them.
I'm not sure what the minor players in the industry do.
They didn't used to, but Dell and HP have 3-prong plugs now. So do Acer, ASUS, Lenovo, etc. Apple seems to be the only common one without a 3-prong plug, and only the 'duckhead' is 2-prong... or you can use a 2-prong 'figure 8' cable off a radio, camera charger, etc., which is how I charge my MacBook on the 2-prong inverter built into my car.