The new Japanese postdoc in our lab complained that his new Toshiba laptop, although made in Japan, does not have a Japanese system. He is running Win-XP (or win-Me? ), IE6 and WORD in his lappy, all English systems. He asked me if there is a way to change all these into Japanese menu display. I thought he can do so by running windows update. But since I have never done this before, I decided it's better to come here and ask the experts' advice first.

Try do what I suggested here, but when you get to the 'Regional and Languages options',
click on the 'Languages' tab,
then click 'installl files for East Asian Languages'



I haven't tried Japanese, but it might work.

Don't think you can, think you'd need to install Japanese XP, though I'm not 100% sure.

There is a Win XP multi-language pack available somewhere,
I have it and it changes all menus to Japanese.
Don't know how it's licensed so I'm not sure if I could share it with you
especially if it's in office environment.

You might want to read this article for more information. Check here for Office information. Should be more links on Microsoft as well.