JIS keyboard became a US keyboard

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Level 1

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JIS keyboard became a US keyboard

Hi all, this is my first post on this forum, so please be kind 😉

I have a Japanese Macbook 3.1 and it's nearly 2 years old. The built-in keyboard is JIS - that is, the punctuation keys are slightly different and it has Japanese characters as well as the roman alphabet. Until now, it's worked perfectly. I also usually use an apple wireless JIS keyboard, and that works fine, too (unless used in tandem with the new magic mouse, but that's a story for another post).

Suddenly, about a week ago, for no apparent reason, the keyboard layout changed to a US layout. So now all the punctuation doesn't match the keyboard. For example, I press the ')' button, and I get '('. Very annoying.

I've racked my brain trying to find a solution, and spent hours going through discussion forums, but I haven't been able to find a solution. I tried the 'change keyboard type' button, but that didn't work because a) it only works for connected keyboards, not the built-in keyboard, and b) even when I set my bluetooth keyboard to JIS, it still works as a US keyboard.

I tried using Terminal (I'm a relatively new Mac user, and Terminal is still quite foreign to me). I tried deleting the .plist (sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist) to force the computer to re-identify the keyboard, but again, this is only for external keyboards, as far as I can tell. I also tried the keyboardsetup.app in Terminal, but that didn't appear to do anything (it didn't find any unknown keyboards)

I also read about resetting the PMU, but as far as I can tell, the Macbook doesn't have this...is that right?

Has anybody had the same problem? How did you fix it?

Message was edited by: furikakekid

Macbook 3.1, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Dec 19, 2009 6:15 PM

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Answer 1

K Shaffer

Level 8

36,010 points

Dec 19, 2009 6:53 PM in response to furikakekid

Hello, and welcome to the Apple Discussion forums!

The issue you face is rather unusual and beyond my experience;
however I did find two topic links to resetting the MacBook & MB/Pro
System Management Controller; the micro-computer power manager.

• *Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller* (SMC)
Dec 9, 2009 ... The System Management Controller (SMC) is responsible for many...
should not remove on your own include MacBook Pro (Early 2009) and later...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

• *Apple Portables: Resetting the System Management Controller* (SMC)
MacBook Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air. The System Management Controller is
an integrated circuit (computer chip) that is on the logic board of the computer...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1411

Hopefully that aspect will help the situation you face. If you had an externally
cloned full copy of your computer's OS X and hard disk drive contents, I'd
suggest a totally new full reinstall of the OS X as a test. With a backup full
content clone of the computer (as you have it now) you could re-clone that
later if a full new install - on a wiped, zero-overwritten, reformatted drive,
proved to not be the answer. A proven clone, on bootable external drive, is
one tool that can be very handy in troubleshooting.

Good luck & happy computing! 🙂

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Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,154 points

Dec 19, 2009 7:19 PM in response to furikakekid

Has anybody had the same problem? How did you fix it?

It comes up here every now and then. I think going through these procedures normally fixes it:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1431

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Answer 3

furikakekid Author

Level 1

0 points

Dec 23, 2009 8:56 PM in response to K Shaffer

Thanks guys for your help. Much appreciated.

I tried your suggestion to reset the SMC, but unfortunately it didn't help.

So I rang the Apple customer service here in Japan. To my surprise the phone call was toll-free, even from a mobile. They were very helpful and even called me back several times. I usually only complain about Apple customer service in Japan, so it's nice to be able to say something nice about them for a change.

Anyway, my keyboard is working properly again now, and I'll write about how it got fixed so in case anybody else has this problem they can find some help here.

So, resetting the SMC didn't work, so we tried clearing the PRAM by restarting and holding CMD-OPT-P-R. According to the Apple operator, that usually helps with this problem, but it didn't in my case.

Next we created a new user account to see if the problem was system-wide, or just specific to my user account. The keyboard worked fine in the new account, so the problem was specific to my user account, which suggested that the problem was in one of the libraries (.plist).

The operator consulted her techies and called me back. Unfortunately, there was no way to find the problem without going through every .plist one by one, so in the end I had to do an 'erase and install'. So I backed up with Time Machine and reinstalled.

When I restored from Time Machine, I had to do it manually by dragging and dropping from my external hard drive. I restored everything EXCEPT the 'library' folder. The operator went through the back-up library folder with me, taking only those .plists that I really needed, such as my email settings etc.

And that's it. Finished. Took me ages, and I'll never know what caused the problem in the first place.

Thanks again for your help, everyone.

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