Changing default language in Google Chrome

I’m not sure if this is the right subforum but I can’t see anywhere better so here goes.
I’m wondering if anyone knows a way to force Chrome to default to Japanese over Chinese results when searching? I’ve got an extension that is supposed to force it to display kanji instead of hanzi when a website doesn’t specify, but it doesn’t seem to affect the search bar. For example I just tried to search for 宗派 because I couldn’t find any example sentences for it and wanted to see it in use, but all the hits are in Chinese - Chinese wikipedia, baidu, the Chinese version of linguee and reverso, etc. I know I can get around this by adding the hiragana of the word I’m searching for into the search bar as well, but I’m hoping there’s a way to change the underlying settings for good. I’ve had a look in the Chrome language settings but the only options seem to be to change the overall operating language, which I want to keep as English.
TIA

You can change your Google search settings (if that’s the search engine you’re using). Presumably other engines have similar.

(Personally, I usually just add “site:*.jp”.)

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You can use Advanced Search, or add &lr=lang_ja to the end of your search url.

Changing languages from the Settings menu seems to change the whole search engine’s language, and adding Japanese to the search result languages did nothing at all for me.

Edit:By the way, it’s worth adding Japanese as a language in Settings>Advanced>Languages>Language>Add Languages if you haven’t already. Before I did that I had some kanji appear differently (in their Chinese incarnation?), most notably 直.

I’ve never had much luck with Chrome or Google search settings for this. What I think helps most is adding additional words. Want a definition? Add 意味. Want example sentences? Add 例文.

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I haven’t tested on desktop, but at least on mobile, all google services check the system language and use that by default. So when I set my phone to be in Japanese, all google searches, including the maps, defaulted to japanese. I would imagine desktop is the same, so its worth a try.

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