Partially working search with picky and japanese

application.rb

# encoding: utf-8
#
# TODO Adapt the generated example
#      (a library books finder) to what you need.
#
# Questions? Mail me, IRC #picky, the google group, http://github.com/floere/picky/wiki.
#
class PickySearch < Picky::Application

  # So we don't have to write Picky::
  # in front of everything.
  #
  include Picky

  # How text is indexed. Move to Index block to make it index specific.
  #
  indexing removes_characters: /[^a-zA-Z0-9\s\/\-\_\:\"\&\.]/i,
           stopwords:          /\b(and|the|of|it|in|for)\b/i,
           splits_text_on:     /[\s\/\-\_\:\"\&\/]/

  # How query text is preprocessed. Move to Search block to make it search specific.
  #
  searching removes_characters: /[^\p{Han}\p{Katakana}\p{Hiragana}a-zA-Z0-9\s\/\-\_\&\.\"\~\*\:\,]/i, # Picky needs control chars *"~:, to pass through.
            stopwords:          /\b(and|the|of|it|in|for)\b/i,
            splits_text_on:     /[\s\/\-\&]+/,
            maximum_tokens: 5, # Amount of tokens used in a search (5 = default).
            substitutes_characters_with: CharacterSubstituters::WestEuropean.new # Normalizes special user input, Ä -> Ae, ñ -> n etc.

  japanese_index = Indexes::Memory.new :japanese do
    source Sources::CSV.new(:japanese, :german, :file => "data/development/japanese.tab", :col_sep => "\t")

    indexing :removes_characters => /[^\p{Han}\p{Katakana}\p{Hiragana}\s;]/,
             :stopwords =>         /\b(and|the|of|it|in|for)\b/i,
             :splits_text_on =>    /[\s;]/

    category :japanese, :partial => Partial::None.new
  end

  route %r{\A/japanese\Z} => Search.new(japanese_index) do

  end

end

Cool. I hope to release 3.0.0 soon. But first, a lot of documentation needs to be updated, and possible API inconsistencies found.

No worries, I just wanted to point out some improvements you could make. But it seems you already know all this :)