Bug#902821: qa.debian.org: Asian (JP, CH) input impossible, when locale is not Asian (LANG=en_US, etc)

[Andrey <japanpersonals@gmail.com>]

Package: qa.debian.org
Severity: important
Tags: l10n

Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?
Installing Debian9/Gnome with US English locales/UI, or changing locales/UI
from Japanese to US English
   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)?
Installed Debian9/Gnome with US lang/UI - Japanese input impossible.
Installed Debian with Japanese lang/UI - Japanese input works well,
multilingual input switching works (tried ja_JP+en_US+ka_GE+ru_RU)
Switched Debian installation to en_US lang/UI by adding necessary locales, and
using Gnome Region settings - Japanese input became impossible.
Tried im-config - no effect.

   * What was the outcome of this action?
With non-Japanese (English) UI in Debian9/Gnome, Japanese input is impossible.
Japanese can be switched on, but only English characters appear. Japanese
keyboard special buttons do not work.
   * What outcome did you expect instead?
Expected Japanese kanji input possible along with English(using the same
Japanese layout), and Georgian, Russuan (using ka_GE, and ru_RU layouts); like
it works with Japanese locales, and Japanese Gnome UI.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.4
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-6-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)