My wife has a Hotmail account that is defaulted to Japanese. She got tired of Outlook acting weird and sometimes not converting the incoming message correctly or when she would send a e-mail and the receiver getting junk characters.
So I set her up a Hotmail account and she now has no issues getting or sending Japanese e-mail. Well I was able to score her a Gmail account last week and after we got it setup we went looking for language options. From everything we could see volunteers had already done the language translation as a volunteer page said it as 100% done. But there was no way to turn on Japanese as the default language. It appears they will have a international language option but for now it is only English if anyone has figured out how to change the default language we would appreciate a e-mail to shokoc at gmail.com
Her first reaction to Gmail and she is not a techie is that it is a lot faster than Hotmail and will be switching as soon as they enable International characters.