Reading Japanese?

No, I don't read Japanese, nor speak it - but I dabble. An excellent Firefox plugin for when I must make the effort, is RikaiXUL, from Todd Rudick. Moving the mouse over a Kanji does an instantaneous dictionary lookup and displays the matches. Its smart feature is the ability to intelligently use adjacent Kanji or Kana. Very clever. As it is released under GPL, Jon Zarate was able to enhance the code and create rickaichan. I have RikaiXUL installed under Firefox 1.0.7 on an elderly IBM Thinkpad, and it works well. Rickaichan I have installed on an old HP box under the new Firefox 1.5. It's faster, and displays more information, not all of which you may need (stroke count etc.). But, both are fine products, and very usable. Both can be easily disabled when not required. (I imagine the underlying dictionary is Jim Breen's KanjiDic).