[Gimp-user] Cannot enter Japanese text?

[Daniel Hauck <daniel yacg com>]

The causes of this could be all sorts of things so I do not expect other 
users to have this trouble at all.  But here are my circumstances:

1. Running CentOS 6.3 (running GNOME 2.x and all that)
2. I have mozc installed as my Japanese input method
3. I compiled GiMP 2.8 (and a boat-load of dependencies) from source 
into /opt/gimp-2.8

One annoying symptom which may or may not be related is the fact that my 
GTK themes do not apply or carry over from my normal operating environment.

But the reason I'm writing this is that I cannot enter Japanese text 
into GiMP.  When I open the text tool, I try to switch over to mozc and 
I cannot when using either CTRL-SPACE or ALT-~ (alt-grave).  And I also 
cannot do it by clicking the IME selection thing in the systray as it 
says "(i) No input window" when I put the mouse to it.

I can, however, open up gedit or some other text editor, create Japanese 
text, copy and paste it into GiMP.

Was/is there a compile option to enable other input methods?  Or GTK 
themes?  Or for that matter command line switches or environment 
variables I need to set from a shell script launch routine to address 
either of these problems?