Back in August 2025, I wrote up an explanation of the kana-based Naginata Style keyboard layout for typing Japanese. Lately I have started doing touch typing practise with this, and have just updated to Naginata Style v17 from Jan 2026. Time for a brief review, including how I've tweaked it for slightly smaller keyboards.
Touch Typing Training
I started Naginata Style touch typing training with the Kana mode at Kana-Dojo, which made a good initial impressio. However, it was setup assuming Hepburn Romanisation, and unlike the IME in most operating systems, it wouldn't accept alternatives like either "si" or "shi" for し, or "nn" for ん (which my keyboard was sending). While they did improve this on prompting, that was only for the simplest "classic" mode which I used in my bug report. They missed some like "zi" or "ji" for じ, or "sya" or "sha" for しゃ, or "tya" or "cha" for ちゃ - and then ignored my efforts to flag this, and that it was support was missing in Blitz and Gauntlet mode. My bug report that kana training with the IME on was mostly broken was also summarily closed.
I'm currently trying the less pretty JapaneseTypingPractice.com, which starts from practicing typing in JLPT N5 and N4 level sentences given with kanji and furigana - appropriate to my current level.
Changes in Naginata Style v17
On discovering I was a version behind, it took a while to find the blog post about the changes in Naginata Style v17 - Toshihiko Ōoka writes a lot. The actual changes in v17 are minor, rotating four rarer kana on the shifted layer, and a tweak to the editing layer:
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| Naginata Style v17, with changes from v16 in red. |
I did find a few more recent posts of interest, including one where he mentioned in passing that he has a number pad on a layer accessed from a thumb key - answering one of my open questions.
Finger placement
In this 2026-03-05 blog post, Ōoka-san shared a diagram of the fingering he uses with the Naginata Style layout - standard column based (his actual keyboard is a orthonormal MiniAxe), but with the ring finger taking Qwerty Q and P:
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| Naginata Style v17 layout coloured by finger allocation |
Me too! I've actually adjusted the placement of the Qwerty Q and P in my most recent keyboard designs to make them easier to reach with my ring finger, rather than having them at the top of my staggered and splayed pinky column (which is now just two keys).
32-keys
Now, fingering brings me to a minor pain point - which was only an issue due to my keyboard shape: I'm using a Hummingbird Keyboard-like layout with 32 keys, where the inner column has just two keys. I'm giving up the dedicated Naginata Style left and right cursors at Qwerty T and Y (and use cursors on a thumb-key layer instead). I don't use the Naginata Style editing layer, so didn't worry about the impacts there.
That leaves just two keys on the left and right inner columns, but they are vertically centred, and I want to keep home row keys っ/ち and く/や at the more comfortable lower position. That means そ/ぬ and た/お get swapped to the top of these columns. In fact, on my larger Gamma Omega I find the top of the inner column easier than the bottom of the inner column, so I've flipped it there too.
So, on my variant, っ/ち and く/や stay at the natural home row, but そ/ぬ and た/お are above them, and if present the left and right arrows are below them.
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| Peter's variant of Naginata Style v17 for 32-keys |
I'm still not entirely happy about the four thumb keys, but wanted to keep things consistent with my English layout. Thus on the right hand my upper case shift for English becomes kana-shift when held, while the other key remains my numbers and navigation key when held. Here they are space and shift+space when tapped, for use in kanji suggestion selection. The left hand retains backspace to match my English layout (redundant with the right index finger's delete), while the last key is currently another kana-shift when held or Enter when tapped (redundant with combos and an Enter on the numbers and navigation layer).
This Naginata Style modification should work nicely on the Onishi Fish Keyboard, if you didn't want to use their popular romaji-based layout which is intended to be good for both Japanese and English.
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