There are too many Japanese characters to be able to use one byte to handle all of them.
Hiragana — over 50 characters
Katakana — over 50 characters
Kanji — over 6,000 characters
So the Japanese Character set has to be multi-byte. JIS=Japan Industrial Standard, this specifies it.
JIS X 0208 in 1990, updated in 1997 — covers widely used
characters, not all characters
JIS X 0213 in 2000, updated in 2004
There are also vendor defined Japanese charsets — NEC Kanji and IBM Kanji — these supplement JIS X 0208.
Cellphone specific symbols have been introduced, so the # of characters is actually increasing!
For JIS X 0208, there are multiple encodings — Shift_JIS (all characters are 2 …
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