Search should be working, but "IME" is below the current MySQL minimum word length. I believe only Aureus and Arcon can change this setting.
As for why the IME may not be working, the most likely reason is that your system locale is not set to Japanese. As FFXI is not unicode-aware, the OS converts the candidate strings into your current system codepage (most likely CP1252, which doesn't support any Japanese characters) before handing them to FFXI, so everything shows up as "?". Setting the System locale to Japanese fixes this, but it causes file paths to display using ¥ instead of \, as well as a slew of less noticeable issues.
If that's not the problem you're experiencing, then you'll need to explain the problem more precisely.