Heya, thanks for the warm welcome, I’m currently living in Wee Waa northwestern NSW, near Tamworth/Dubbo,
as for hirigana keyboard, its the ability to change the keyboard language via control panel > regions> keyboard> then click on Japanese and tick microsoft ME, click ok on all the box’s to close them, and you will notice that down near the sytem tray you will probably see EN, if you click on that, you can change it to japanese, after doing that you will be able to select hirigana katakana and alphanumeric characters, so after you do that, go open up notepad or something and as you write ” wa ta shi wa, or whatever it gets converted on the fly to the Hiragana characters, pretty cool. ill put a link to where i found out about it, ew wall of text.
http://www.tofugu.com/guides/type-japanese-windows-7/