Mind-boggling Japanese font sizes

Two friends from Singapore are coming over to visit and I’m keen on showing off the new apartment. I want to cook them a Japanese meal but we don’t have a dining table. I perused a few furniture catalogs, and finally, the kangaroo and I agreed on a long, white dining table and five red/black chairs from Askul, an online office furniture shop.

It sounds strange to be ordering from them but their selection is quite flexible and home-friendly that you could very well decorate your house nicely with their offerings.

Anyway, I had to add our home address to the online form after the shopping cart was full. This was when the trouble started. This online form requires full-sized and half-sized font widths. What the heck are they, you may ask? Apparently, Japanese fonts run on a different kind of computer coding system. For English readers, this just doesn’t matter at all. Whatever you type into an online form, it would get accepted.

For banking online, there’s a soft keyboard (or, a virtual keyboard) for you to use so whatever you key in is set according to what the form requires — be it full-sized or half-sized. From my experience, you just need half-sized ones.

But for Askul, they have a mix. What the f%^^&*? Unfortunately, my old iBook only has a half-sized katakana palette:

For those of you who can read Mandarin, you can see the circled bit that it says “ban”.

Where are the numbers? Addresses are a mix of numbers and Japanese characters so it was infuriating to find the number palette with only full-sized font widths (again, Mandarin readers, see the “chuan” character?):

In the end, I had to ask a Japanese colleague to fix it for me on her PC. Why am I making a big deal out of this? Well, wouldn’t anyone hate to rely on others for even the simplest daily routines?

“Ah, the joys of living in a country where you don’t speak the language,” sighed the kangaroo.

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