can't input Japanese in kinput2

[Scott <scottro@example.com>]

Firstly, I should mention that the hard drive on this old box is slowly 
dying.  I'm not sure if that's a factor or not.

I'm running RH 7.1 English, with Japanese support.  Kinput2 and canna are 
both installed, cannaserver starts on bootup, and kterm opens without 
problem.  However, when I hit shift + space I don't get the hiragana "a" 
that one should get.  I tried reinstalling kinput (from an RPM on the RH 
CD) however, still no luck.  When it's running properly, I'm able to input 
Japanese in either vi or pico without problem.

I suspect I left out something while upgrading the kernel, but I'm not sure 
what--I've looked at the man pages for both canna and kinput2, however, no 
doubt due to ignorance, I'm still  not sure what I might have left out 
during recompilation.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Scott Robbins