[ue_]

Do people really use romaji on keyboards in Japan? This strikes me as an odd way to type, as it means that you first need to learn romaji in order to type. I thought that hiragana keyboards (hiragana mapped onto the normal layout) were the norm, especially on laptop keyboards.

[Iv]

A typical keyboard will look like this: https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2394848830a7526592f3a1...

But none of the Japanese I know use the hiragana directly. They told me it is mostly old people who use it. Almost every Japanese knows romajis now, there is no additional cost of learning a new alphabet.