Windows – How to change japanese keymap from QWERTZ to QWERTY on Windows 10

japanesekeyboardkeyboard-layoutlanguagewindows 10

I'm native German speaker so the keyboard layout I'm used to is QWERTZ. Since about a year or so I've had the chance to study Japanese and part of it is obviously also writing texts in Japanese. I therefore added the Japanese language to my system and a corresponding keyboard to which I can switch via Left Alt + Shift and this works just fine. The only problem I have with it is that the underlying keymap seems to be QWERTY, which can be pretty annoying…

I don't really know how to fix this, but what I basically want is to switch just the Japanese keyboard from QWERTY to QWERTZ. Any idea how this can be achieved?

Note: I'm sorry if I misused the word "keymap" and "keyboard layout" here, I'm not really familiar with the right terminology.. If the question is not clear, please let me know, I'll try to explain it better…

Best Answer

This procedure should help:

  • Start regedit
  • Navigate to key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts\00000411
  • Ensure you are on the right key : "Layout Text" should read "Japanese"
  • Change the value of "Layout File" from "KBDJPN.DLL" to "KBDGR.DLL" (without the quotes)
  • Reboot.

If this doesn't help, undo it by returning the value of "KBDJPN.DLL" (without quotes).

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