AstroBoy Online Forums

It seems that it is possible to enter Katakana characters (and possibly other Japanese fonts) into a text document from Libre/Open office via several methods. If you press ctrl+shift+u and then enter the four digit hex unicode for the desired character (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana) while still holding down the ctrl+shift, the desired character will be inserted and the correct font will be selected. If you manually select the desired font from the drop down list (TakaoPGothic) then you can use the 'insert special character' function, the Japanese character set is then visible in the drop down list.

鉄腕 アトム

Actually the unicode insert method works from the keyboard (on Linux, maybe also windows?) for input to any program, I just inserted the unicode characters U+9244 U+8155 U+30A2 U+30C8 U+30E0 to write Tetsuwan Atomu in Japanese.

also see this:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U30A0.pdf
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3040.pdf (Hiragana)

And if you really want to go crazy, here is the Kanji unicode chart
http://www.tonypottier.info/Unicode_And_Japanese_Kanji/Appendix2.html

I just use lookup tables from Wikipedia, etc., though it took me a while to find a few unusual kana characters. Then use AUTOCORRECT, create codes for the kana & frequently used Kanji.

I just entered the codes for Hiragana in my autocorrect; they work fine, but I am still not as familiar with some of the characters as is needed to use them without having the Wikipedia table open on my desktop.

'ha==" makes 'あ'; 'h' for Hiragana'; 'Ningen==' results in '人間'. I still copy & pates for the Katakana, as they are used far less frequently. A few words & names:
'Hgyz--' becomes 'ヒゲオヤジ' (Higeoyaji), though I may change the '--' to '==' for consistency's sake.