Emacs not aware of Japanese fonts?

[Roland Mas <mas@echo.fr>]

Hi there,

I've been trying to type Japanese in Emacs, apparently in vain.

  The toggle-input-method command works, since I find myself in the
situation where I can start typing phonetically.  I find the same
behaviour as I had way back when I had compiled and installed Emacs on
my Red Hat machine: I can choose the kanji I wish to see instead of
the phonetic transcription I have typed.

  Except that I can't see any Japanese character on my screen.  Nice
little boxes instead, all looking the same, none looking as a Japanese
character.  So I guess it's a font problem.  I have installed
virtually all the font packages I found, apparently without any
effect.  Could this be something I missed with Emacs configuration?
The /usr/share/emacs/20.5/etc/PROBLEMS file says :

(Snip)
* Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.

Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
supports.  To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
many different fonts, collected into a fontset.

If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.

The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
display all the characters Emacs supports.
(Snip)

  Unfortunately, the intlfonts package is removed and no longer
available (dixit dselect).

  Any idea?
-- 
Roland Mas

It would be hard to be deader without special training.
  -- in Theatre of Cruelty (Terry Pratchett)