As I’m on the cusp of installing Windows 11 on a new computer–and having to build said computer–I’ve been tasked with hunting down a Japanese version of Windows 11. Microsoft has rarely made this easy, and in recent years border control over software has made other retailers like Amazon Japan, Rakuten, etc. reluctant to ship overseas. I had hoped that purchasing a digital version of Windows 11 and running the Media Creation Tool would allow for easy installation. Unfortunately, not having a current Japanese address or a credit card linked to that address was the obstacle here.

I can never really tell in this our age of Unicode what differences there might be between a Japanese version of Windows and Windows running a Japanese language pack. Searching the Internet yields some suggestion that it might be possible to install English language Windows, change the region and language, and come out with a feasible equivalent. Possibly altering some settings to force Unicode on legacy Japanese programs would aid in this. Sadly, posts such as the one where I found the tip above seem to suggest that there remain some differences that cannot be accounted for by merely a region change and language pack.

The population that functions in both English and another language, particularly one that does not rely on the Western alphabet, is not small. But what Microsoft and other tech companies seem to forget is that they exist outside of the mother countries of those languages. Reinforcing region locks and language settings based on country feels outright user hostile at times, particularly as tech workers as a body diversify within the United States, particularly Asian American workers, who are likely to operate in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, among other languages, in addition to English. That isn’t to say that these workers are not served by a language pack and Microsoft’s IME bar, but it’s hard to tell if this actually is sufficient or merely a stopgap measure. It also inconveniences users accustomed to hardware–particularly keyboards–that functions with different layouts and has different language input priorities than the standard US QWERTY keyboard.

Perhaps the company that, whether consciously or not, has made a point of being equitable from this perspective is Apple. Apple has for a long time sold computers and keyboards on its US website with non-US layouts, and made a point of making macOS function in multiple languages, without the question of whether a different language version would be needed. macOS isn’t macOS English Edition; there aren’t different versions advertised on different region-facing Apple websites. macOS just is what it is, and to complement that, I can purchase an Apple keyboard with whatever keyboard layout I want to go along with it. Even the various iPad keyboards are offered in multiple layouts.

Nevertheless, Apple itself is not perfect, and perhaps one area where this approach to software and hardware development falters is with Apple Music. Apple Music has truly attempted to get as much music under its umbrella, and surprisingly little of it is actually region restricted. Apple Music’s K-Pop and J-Pop selections are surpringly robust and well-curated.

That said, Apple Music has a tenuous relationship with song information and language. Frankly, it’s a mess. Using the example of Japanese, most music tracks are romanized and have titles written out phonetically. Occasionally, there will be an album with information written in Japanese script, or an album with song titles in English translation (often soundtracks). It’s never really clear what determines which US equivalents are used when displaying Japanese songs. Popping over onto Japanese Apple Music, everything is displayed properly in Japanese script, so clearly there are some variant titles for different markets built into the Apple Music database.

This is probably a case of Apple targeting what it believes to be average listeners in this region: those for whom romanized titles would better serve them. For someone who has long curated a large library of local files with titles in Japanese kana, this is a bit of a nuisance. It messes with playing statistics, and confuses Apple Music’s matching function. Apple Music is smart enough to preserve local ID3 data when syncing music to the cloud, thank goodness. But it means that many of the discovery and library features of Apple Music are closed off to users who operate in multiple languages. Creating a playlist of local files and Apple Music files leads to chaos in the song titles. I can’t fault Apple for its choice of priorities, but I do. It feels like the company could at least build in a "display non-Western ID3 information in its language of origin" option into the service.

I remember the days of Shift JIS and EUC, and what a boon it was when UTF-8 became the majority standard for Japanese language use on the Internet. UTF-8 was supposed to standardize not just Internet use, but also computer input in general. Now, years later, results remain inconclusive.