Meanwhile, I deal with the opposite- after first buying a laptop imported from Japan when I was in high school I've gotten used to the Japanese keyboard and I time my laptop upgrades around visits to Japan. I don't like the US punctuation placement anymore.

Hahahahaha! That's just hilarious. =D

I bought a jp netbook last year. I got it partly because I wanted to learn the japanese keyboard, and partly to improve my japanese. But since I'm a programmer, and have been using the american keyboard for 30 years, it's been difficult. =D I... think I've gotten used to the weird @ placement, but quotes are still a huge PITA. =D

What sort of laptop upgrades? Are you talking hardware or software?

p.s., how the heck do you escape the carat on this forum so it doesn't turn into a stupid thumbs-up?!

horse>mule

But paper > rock, so HA!





Oh god, I really ought to go to sleep. >.>

Hardware. And by upgrade I mean like upgrading a new phone- buy a "new" (usually I go to Sofmap and buy the least dinged-up Panasonic I can find for under 50k yen) laptop and either sell off or keep around the old laptop as a backup.

I had a bit of a learning curve with my first Japanese laptop too, but it only took me a couple weeks to get used to quotes being Shift-2, apostrophes being Shift-7, colons and semicolons and @ being separate keys, etc, now I get mildly frustrated when I have to use a computer that's not my own back here in the States.

I still get tripped up when I go back home - not overly so, as the differences aren't that big. I like the placement of the @ key on a Japanese keyboard.

The real annoying thing for me is that I have a Mac and a PC - some of the keyboard shortcuts (for forcing conversions, such as if I want to change something automatically to katakana) are different.

Well, its been a month.

Learned quite a bit through the process.
Typing via my brand new Toshiba Satellite laptop purchased online and shipped to Japan via my home in Canada.

As other posters have mentioned, if I just purchased from amazon Japan it could have solved a lot of my headaches.

However it isn't as easy - especially when I didn't have a working computer which had all my passwords, online information available.

As a Canadian, I have an Amazon Canada account linked to my Canadian credit card.

I do not have any other credit cards except Canadian credit cards.

I could not figure out / still can't figure out how to purchase something via Amazon Canada with a Canadian credit card and have it shipped to Japan.

I could not open an Japanese amazon account mainly due to language issues. While not having a Japanese credit card was a hassle, I could have gone to a store and purchased a couple of amazon gift cards to facilitate the purchase so that is not a valid excuse. The process just felt overwhelming.

All above was really hard to do via tablet and via an internet cafe because my computer was DOA.

Of course, now that everything is fixed. Hindsight I could have done a few things better.

Glad to hear you are up and running despite some hiccups.

Just coming back to address this point:

For a laptop, the option won't even come up. They'll only ship media (books, CDs, DVDs, etc) out of Canada. Same if you try to buy something from Amazon Japan to send to Canada (thus why services like Tenso exist).