On your main Mixi page, click on the “Edit Photos” link in the top left area of the screen (English screenshot here – Mixi English Screenshot)

This will take you to the Edit Photos screen below. If this is your first time, there will be no photos and 3 placeholders for you to replace with your own images. See what it looks like below in both English and Japanese screens:

Let’s get started and upload our pretty face. Go ahead and click the “browse” button. This will open a dialog bo, allowing you to browse your computer for the photo you want to use. After choosing the photo, you will be returned to the same screen.

To upload the currently selected photo, click the “Upload a photo” button.

Voila!

You can now see your photo and room for 2 more. Let’s add those 2 more photos now by repeating the steps above 2 more times.

Good job, your photos look great

Now you will have some photos and underneath it will say “Delete” and either “Set as default” or “Default”. By default, it means the photo which will show on your Mixi page which other people see. They can see all of your photos, but it takes an extra step on their part, so choose the photo you most want people to see as your “Default”.

Here are the English and Japanese screens showing you where these buttons are:

That’s about it, you have now achieved the rank of “Mixi Grasshopper”. Keep reading these tutorials and as you master the skills of Mixi, you can progress through the ranks of “Mixi Mushi-king”, “Mixi Salaryman”, “Mixi Salaryman with company spending account” and finally “Mixi Miyagi”! Ganbatte (Good luck!)

To write a post, click on the “Posts” button in your Mixi menu bar. It is the 3rd button from the left in Japanese:

Here is a screenshot in English of the menu bar – Mixi English menu bar.

This will take you to your Posts/Diary screen, where you will need to click on the following “Write a post” button as shown below in both English and Japanese:

The next screen you’ll be taken to is where you write the content of your post, it’s title and optionally attach up to 3 images. In English and Japanese:

At the bottom of the screen is a checkbox which allows you to specify wether to resize your images to a Mixi-friendly size or add them to your post at the original size of the photo as is on your computer.

I recommend leaving the box checked 99.9% of the time.

Once you have filled in your title, the body of your post and selected your images, hit the big brown “Confirm Post” button at the bottom and you will be taken to a screen to check your post before it goes live.

Don’t worry too much here, you can still edit your post anytime after you have published it. Now, go ahead and click “yes” which is the left of the two brown buttons.

Now exhale a sigh of relief, your first post is out there for the 10 million or so Mixi users to see (unless you chose in your settings not to allow everyone to see your Mixi pages).

This is the confirmation screen with an advertisement Mixi likes to throw-in:

Now what?

Japanese love to use the “footprints” feature built-into Mixi. This is called ashiato and allows you to see who has been coming and looking at your Mixi pages. We’ll be covering that real soon so stay tuned.

Thanks to Chantelle for reminding me that Canadians dig Mixi too

Averse to what the name would imply, she’s not some cute little anime or game character, but a life-saving Firefox extension which helps to translate difficult kanjis or any Japanese words you cannot read.

It is compatible with all versions of Firefox and can translate highlighted/hover-overed words from Japanese to:

• English
• German
• French
• Russian

Here is a quote from their people:

Japanese to English/German/French/Russian dictionary. Just hover the mouse on top of a word, and a popup appears. Automatically de-inflects verbs and adjectives. Detailed kanji view.

And here is the link to check it out:

Rikai-chan – Firefox extension

Rikai-chan homepage

Video of Rikai-chan in action (amazing!)

Now that’s out of the way, here’s how to find Australia in your profile and user registration screens in Mixi:

(It’s the blue highlighted one!)

Try not to be confused with Austria, which is directly below and has all the same characters bar one.

It’s good to have some Aussies using Mixi too

Add some bling to your Mixi profile without having to read any Japanese:

Customizing your Mixi profile

Remember to try the “Formatting” orange button to add pretty colours to your profile

To do this, click on the “profile” profile menu button at the top of the screen. You can find this easily by checking our English version of the Mixi screen here – Mixi screen in English.

The following preview of your profile will be displayed. You must then click on the “Edit profile” button as shown in the next images:

This will take you to a screen with editable text boxes where you can change all the details of your profile for others to see.

Use the following images in both English and Japanese as a guide to what information is located where. You’ll remember from our previous tutorials that the drop down menus on the right of the screen have 3 options (in order):

• display to my friends only
• display to my friends and their friends
• display to everyone in Mixi

Once you have all your details as you like, click on the dark brown-colored “save changes” button at the bottom of the screen.

This will take you to a confirmation screen where you will see your details again and at the bottom, 2 more brown buttons, the one on the left is “Yes” and the one on the right is “No”. Click on the left of the 2 buttons to save your profile’s changes. See the confirmation screen here:

This will return you to your profile screen in Mixi.

To get back to your home or “top” page, you can click on the “home” button, or on the big Mixi logo at the top-left of your screen. This is a shortcut to always take you back to your home page. The area to click is highlighted below:

Here’s how:

Start by going to the Mixi page of the friend you would like to contact.

Once there, there will be a blue menu bar running along the top of the page. The “Message” button we want to click on is second from the left, highlighted here:

Clicking on the correct button will bring up a “Send Message” screen with places to fill in your title and message content to send. See an example already filled-out here:

When you are happy with your message and are ready to send, simply click on the brown “Confirm” button at the bottom of the screen. This will display your message once more for you to check. Being that we are totally confident they will love the message we wrote them, go ahead and click the brown “Send” button at the bottom of this screen:

Ta-da!

Now,

You are finally shown a confirmation that your message has been sent, along with an advertisement from Mixi asking you to buy women’s fashion accessories or robotic penguins…hey, we love Mixi so I think it’s OK that it’s ad-supported and free for us to use