I took these photos two and a half years ago! And I stuck them in a folder called "FM77AV20EX Nihongo Card", and am only now getting around to uploading them, so forgive me for having lost a few details of what exactly is going on here.

But I think... probably... I ended up with this kind of ratty FM77AV20EX as part of a lot auction, and it came to my attention that my absolutely beautiful FM77AV20EX did not have a Nihongo card, but I think maybe it was supposed to come with one? So my friend theorized that the battery on my old one may have gone bad and prevented the machine from booting, and removing the card was the path of least resistance to getting a bootable computer. Maybe!

But in any event, with the Nihongo card in my own computer, it can now do things it couldn't do before. It's not the ability to display kanji, it could always do that, but I think the purpose of the Nihongo card was to modernize kanji entry. Rather that type the reading in katakana of a single character and choosing the character from a list, you can type in romaji and transform sentences. It feels pretty amazing to be able to do this from an 8-bit computer... usability for productivity really goes through the roof. Not that I am particularly productive with it!