To those who know Japanese...

[Haibane Shadsie]

Just asking a little favor...

I've been working on a big cover image for my webcomic today, so that got me to thinking about the comic. He will not figure into the comic for a while yet, but I have a character for it whose name is "Hiroshima". I think it would be great, in a panel of the comic, to show him with a flag behind him (a cool little flag he owns) with his name on it... in Japanese.

I have a little Katakana chart, so I could sound out the word and write it in Katakana, but as the character is named for the Japanese city, I'd like to, instead, have the name written as native Japanese speakers would write it, which would probably mean Hirigana, since Katakana is used mainly for foriegn word-sounds (?).

Being someone who does not know Japanese, I thought I'd ask for help from the people on the board who know the language or who are studying it. I'd like to be sent, either through a PM, or through my e-mail address ( shadsieblue@yahoo.com ) a small image file with "Hiroshima" written out in Japanese, in one of the writing styles that is used for native words (probably Hirigana, right)? Now, my computer does not have Japanese characters installed, and whenever I've tried to install them (such as when I go to a Japanese language webpage and I get that prompt on my computer), it never has worked... so, whenever I go to a page with Japanese text, I get all kinds of little boxes and messed up characters... so, for this favor, I'd need the file to be made into an image file, a little gif or jpeg.

Just a favor for anyone who might want to do it for me. ^_^; You'd receive, in return, my gratitude, and probably a little note in the margin of the webcomic page its on as a thank you.

By the way, for anyone wondering why I'd name a character "Hiroshima"... it has to do with the character's race - he's a part of a race that was originally genetically engineered soliders/weapons, and his family has a tradition of having names of weapons of mass destruction and devastated cities. He, himself, is not a violent person, it is merely a way to remember the origins of his race of creatures.

Yeah, I'm weird.

[Tycho]

Couple of questions first.
1) Format: Image Size? Font Size? Color?

2) Since it is a Japanese city, you have two choices
1) Hiragana - ひろしま
2) Kanji - 広島
Which would you like?

And to solve you Japanese text issues. I'm assuming you're using windows. To type japanese text, you need to install the Japanese Global IME. You can find this on Microsoft's site. To view japanese text on a website, you need to correctly set the text encoding for that site. If you go to a site that has squiggles and boxes instead of japanese text, go to the view menu of the browser and select character set/character coding/text encoding. Select Japanese from this menu. That should fix the problem. Some browsers have multiple japanese text encodings so you may have to try a couple until you get one that works.