I am interested in a set for typing Japanese and outfitting Japanese keyboards. There’s been a lot of sets with Japanese kits in various stages recently, but as far as I know none of them has all of the kana on the right keys and most have ANSI legends as well.
Now there is a problem, which is that Japanese keyboards don’t have a rigidly standardized bottom row. I want to outfit the HHKB JP (which despite being Topre seems to show up a lot in the keyboard forums; now that Topre→MX sliders are more available, I expect these owners to be a non‐negligible portion of people with interest in this set) and the JIS Filco, coverage for which seems to me to cover the majority of mechanical JIS boards as well. The Filco Manila also has a Japanese version that could be supported with just a few additional keys if desired.
The hard part of having a set made, then, is that the three keyboards for which there is likely to be much demand for a Japanese set (the HHKB JP, JIS Filco, and JIS Filco Manila) all use different, rare space bar sizes (2.5u, 4.5u, and 3u resp.). The only profiles I know of that support all of these key sizes are SA and DCS, and DCS isn’t very popular. Going with SA raises questions as to how to mitigate the costs of Japanese legends, which would likely have to have fresh molds made in order to be double shot. The obvious solution is to instead use dye‐sublimated PBT All‐R3 SA like SA Kabuto, but perhaps someone else has a better idea.
Once I have an idea of whether or not this has enough interest to get off the ground, there can be discussion of mods (icon, text, Japanese, English, blank, ABS double shot...), colors, and secondary support for ANSI and ISO keyboards.
