しあわせ

JEDict is my new favorite mac-based dictionary reader.
Again it uses data from the EDICT project like WordLookup, but it’s searches are much more powerful and speedy. It doesn’t only search on the first character. It has single kanji searches so you can find the meaning of individual components. It has a built in user dictionary so you can collect word lists. You can search for kanji you don’t know the reading of by using a radical index. It has a built in web browser that allows you to click on a word and get a translation!!! I liked it so much I upgraded my OS version to 10.4 in order to use it.
On the down side it isn’t as well designed as Word Lookup and I find it a bit cluttered and hard to read sometimes. However I think this will improve. The changes between 4.0 and 4.0.1 addressed a lot of things I found difficult.
It is shareware at a very reasonable $25. The unregistered version is completly usable but doesn’t allow you extra dictionaries.
Version 4 needs OSX 10.4 but version 3.8 will run on OS8 and above. (version 3 isn’t as full featured however)

WordLookup
is a bilingual dictionary reader. For Japanese it uses data from the EDICT project coordinated by James Breen at the Monash University in Melbourne Australia. WordLookup allows the user to perform searches on the EDICT data. You will need kana to input a Japanese search or to understand the results of an English search. WordLookup can also read other dictionaries such as English-German and English-Chinese, for details see their site.

WordLookup was once free but since version 3 it is now shareware ($15). As always I’d encourage you to support the author. Unfortunatly in order to search for anything beyond “A” you have to buy a licence.
The best new feature of 3 is that it now stores searches. Very useful when checking the meaning of individual kanji in compounds.

LightWayText is a simple word processor. Easily as functional as MacWrite which was all I once ever needed. It was written by a Japanese programmer so it has features that can be hard to find in American programs. (It’s might not be as full featured as something as bloated as Word, but who uses all those features anyhow?)

It is available for both Mac and Windows. (You will need Japanese fonts and system support installed.)
It is shareware and costs US$25, (UK￡14). I don’t think the unregistered version is hampered too much but at such a low price for a program I’d encourage you to register and support the programmer’s work. (You could even surprise Yumi-san and make a nice comment in Japanese! You’ll get the most personable support you’ve ever gotten from a shareware developer.)

The web sites are a bit basic but the program is very good.

It is available as a Japanese version. (All menus and dialogs in Japanese.) For the very brave.

And is also available in English, French and Italian versions.

While Mail is a good program, I found its text encoding wasn’t the best. It defaults to UTF8 which although the best encoding for two byte languages it can be a problem for Japanese readers. Some form of shift JIS or ISO2022-JP seems to be preferred. GyazMail ($18) is a Japanese mail client that has very good handling of text encoding. It will display Japanese in listings, subject headers and the body text. When encoding it will flag illegal characters that the encoding method doesn’t support. (Mail just says that a character can’t be encoded and you’re left to guess which it might be.) I now use GyazMail as my only mail client. Its only shortcoming is if you get a lot of spam. You will need an external spam filter such as SpamSieve ($25).

OSX has Japanese language support included. Either you can run the entire system in Japanese (Good Luck!) or have the ability to write in kana and kanji and view Japanese documents.
Using the International System Preference you can use Romaji, Hiragana and Katakana using a qwerty keyboard.

Use a program that has support for Unicode. TextEdit does for instance. Use a Japanese font (Osaka or Hiragino Kaku Pro).
Select the character system you want to use. Type in romaji (konnichiha) and it will convert on the fly to hiragana (こんにちは) or katakana depending on which keyboard layout you’ve selected. The system also deals with double constants properly and the various や, ゆ, よ, combinations. Press enter when you are happy with the word you have written, then press space if you are separating the words. (Japanese only seems to have spaces after sentences. However this makes more sense when kanji are used and I find that a large run of hiragana difficult to read but maybe thats because I’m used to english.) You can also convert to kanji if you know the correct kanji to choose from a pop up menu that appears when you press space without pressing enter.

Shift when using hiragana will change to katakana. CMD-Space toggles between the last two character sets used. CMD-Opt-Space cycles through the keyboard layouts selected in International. Remembering this stops you merrily typing away in English and having it converted phonetically to Hiragana.
There is also a floating pallette that allows you to select characters by clicking on buttons.

Unfortunately the help for Kotoeri input is in Japanese as it’s intended for speakers rather than learners. However the manual for the previous release of Kotoeri is still available as a download from Apple. Other help might be found at The Multilingual Mac.