Japanese Input on Slackware

I have been looking for the least intrusive way to enter Japanese text on my main Slackware box, without messing with the rest of the system. I am used to running with $LANG set to "en_US", which is the Slackware default. Then using Latin-1/ISO-8859-1 as the encoding in the filesystem and so on.

The goal is enter Japanese text into Mozilla Firefox and (G)Vim, under the Fluxbox window manager.

Fortunately, those two programs are GTK-based and starts SCIM automatically as long as certain environment variables are set. Here is how it's done:

#!/bin/sh
export LC_CTYPE='ja_JP.utf8'
export GTK_IM_MODULE="scim-bridge"
firefox
          

In that Firefox session, Control + Space can be used to switch between input methods.