How to tell GNOME menu items about environment variables?

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

Hello,

I am trying to get a Japanese input method to work with an application
launched from GNOME. This works fine from the terminal with:

$ export LANGUAGE="ja_JP.UTF-8"
$ export LANG="ja_JP.UTF-8"
$ export LC_ALL="ja_JP.UTF-8"
$ export XMODIFIERS="@im=kinput2"
$ kinput2-canna &
$ <execute command exactly as in GNOME menu item>

However, I cannot figure out how to include the environment variable
settings in the GNOME menu item command. Whatever combinations I have
tried, the error is returned that the file or directory does not
exist; i.e., GNOME cannot parse the combination of settings and
commands.

A search of the forums and Google did not turn up answers applicable
to individual apps, only to GNOME as a whole (from control center, gdm
session manager, etc.)

Any help much appreciated,
   Gernot Hassenpflug