Getting Ibus working with tiling window manager

I am wanting to get the Ibus IME (Anthy engine for Japanese input) working in all my window managers. Unity is fine, along with Compiz and Metacity. But the one I really want to get it working with is spectrwm (a tiling window manager - i3m, xmonad are others). I tried running the ibus-daemon, but any of they keyboard shortcuts to change to the different input method don't work. I can't tell whether this is because Ibus isn't working, or it requires the Gnome-panel to function, or just the keyboard shortcuts are being stolen by the desktop manager and thus not passed to ibus. Where do I start in debugging this?