Animal Crossing is already building a huge international community among players. Forums, websites, tumblr, all connecting people from many countries all over the world to share patterns and trade fruits and get together to whack acorn robots with squeaky hammers.

The game even encourages international connection by opening up Club Tortimer so we can be randomly matched with another player somewhere in the world who happens to be playing at the same time.

But since Animal Crossing originally came out in Japan six months earlier than it came out in other countries, a lot of the international players are Japanese. And while this can be an unbreakable language barrier for some, those of us who do know Japanese would love to be able to communicate with them in their own language.

This would make Animal Crossing a fantastic learning tool for students of the Japanese language, allowing them to communicate with native speakers with ease and refine their language skills. With the use of special characters we can already do this with speakers of many European languages, so please make it truly international.

The characters are already in the system, clearly, as we can read what Japanese players type to us, but we don't have a way to input them ourselves. We are asking for Nintendo of America, Nintendo of Europe, and Nintendo divisions everywhere, to please push an update that activates the Kana keyboards for everyone.

ありがとう