JKanji is an interactive character completion system that provides stroke-order-independent recognition of complex handwritten glyphs such as Japanese kanji or Chinese hanzi. As the user enters each stroke, JKanji offers a menu of likely completions, generated from a robust multiscale matching algorithm augmented with a statistical language model. Unlike many existing systems, JKanji can incrementally incorporate new training examples, either to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of a particular user, or to increase its vocabulary. On a kanji input task with a vocabulary of 6369 kanji and English characters, JKanji has demonstrated 93%-96% recognition accuracy and up to 80% reduction in the number of input strokes. JKanji is computationally efficient, processing images at 5-10 Hz on an inexpensive portable computer and is well-suited for integration into personal digital assistants as an input method. JKanji's recognition system also processes low-quality digital camera images.