It's not just the cost of the IME, it's the cost of answering tech support calls for people that accidentally hit the keystroke to change to Japanese text input and get stuck typing kana and kanji with no understanding of what they even did by accident. The manual for the IME in the Japanese PS2 launch version of FFXI is something like 10 pages, and Japanese is a more compact written language. It's also hard to get some customers to read a manual nowadays, and the instructions assume some knowledge of how Japanese works and is romanized. It will cost SE a lot to support it, in English, German, and French, for a feature that won't get a lot of legitimate use, compared to accidental use.

They'd also be cutting out the Xbox 360 and PS2 users if they allowed the MS IME, but didn't pay for the ATOK license on consoles.

The solution they offer is to do a dual install of the Japanese and native clients you use, and switch to the Japanese one when you need that communication. Of course, I haven't been able to get a simultaneous dual install working since WotG released...

At least the PC discs have no copy protection. You could always borrow the discs from someone with the Japanese installer.

Auto-translate wasn't so discrimated against before they added the colored parentheses around it.