I'm thinking of using the Edict dictionaries (
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/j_edict.html ) to make a Japanese IME so
that you can enter Kanji (chinese derived) characters from the keyboard.

The Edict dictionaries are Japanese/English dictionaries, so other features
are possible, like Japanese entry for english speakers that shows English
meanings as well as choices of Kanji characters.

What I'm wondering is this.  I can't post a change set that's 20 megabytes
(or however large the dictionaries would be after loading), and I can't tell
the users to just download the dictionary from the Edict site because it's
in EUC-JP format and needs to be converted to UTF-8 before it can be used...

I have a word processor that can do that conversion, but I can't expect
users to have that.

By the way the licence seems pretty unconstraining.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/groups/edrdg/licence.html