A study investigated the reading and writing strategies used by four students in a Japanese immersion program at an Australian university. Data were gathered through classroom observation, open-ended interviews, and think-aloud protocols. Analysis revealed that the students had a limited repertoire of strategies. Their reading and writing of kanji (Chinese characters) was especially weak. They relied heavily on key words and inference to get meaning from written text. Japanese phonetic scripts and characters were read differently by the students, the former by sound leading to meaning, and the latter by tapping directly into meaning. For the writing of characters, repetition was the basic strategy used. Implications are that students in script-based immersion programs need to be taught specific strategies to deal with the new script. Reliance on strategies carried over from their phonetic-script background are ineffective. Appendices include: description of Australian Second Language Proficiency Ratings (ASLPR); Cloze test used for think aloud protocol; and transcription conventions used. Contains 35 references. (Author/MSE)