日 = ni = sun, 本 = hon = origin, 日本 = nihon = origin of the sun (japan), 語 = go = language, therefore 日本語 = nihongo = japanese

To use Japanese on the web, you need:

• A way to view it. For people who are not running a Japanese version of Windows, Microsoft has a browser extension called "Internet Explorer Multilanguage Support - Japanese Version" which lets you view pages with Japanese characters on them. It includes one TrueType Kanji font for viewing. Just download the extension and click that weird little icon on your status bar, set it to "Japanese (Auto Select)". Works beautifully.
• A way to input Japanese characters. There are Japanese versions of all popular OSes, but what if you're like me and Japanese is a second language?  It would be nice if Microsoft OSes supported this, but the don't really.  They say:
  • "Global IMEs allow you to enter Asian text in Word, in Outlook e-mail messages, and in Internet Explorer. Other Office programs require an Asian operating system or Windows 2000 to allow you to enter Asian text."
• That means we must use some third-party software.  The best-known program is called KanjiKit 2000, which claims to work with Win95 and NT4. It's commercial, costs $200. The free demo is supposedly fully functional except that the font is bitmapped, not TrueType.

So, i tried KanjiKit97:

This is me trying to type hiragana in FrontPage97 using KanjiKit97: ?ﾃｭ ?ﾂｽ ?ﾂｵ ?ﾃｭ ?ﾃ? ?ﾃｱ ?ﾃ? ?ﾂｷ

this is me trying to type kanji and katakana: ?? ?ﾃｭ ?x ???? ?ﾃ? ?ﾂｷ ?

Doesn't seem to work - i only see the correct characters for as long as KanjiKit is running. As soon as i exit, it reverts to bogus characters. Not only that, but the pages i save subsequently look bogus in IE3.

here is some hiragana copied and pasted from another page: まみどりの

and some kanji from that page: 毎日新聞夕刊取材記事の紹介

the above two examples look fine in FrontPage, and fine in IE when IE is set to "Auto Select", but look bogus when KanjiKit is running! Aargh. Besides, copying text from other pages is not an ideal way to write :-)

• The pages i've seen so far use "JIS" encoding - seems to be the most common.

Someday i'd like to have my entire site available in日本語...
perhaps services such as the Machine Translation might help.