At the Osaka Expo 1970, a prototype of the IBM Kanji System was exhibited .
Although the computers in Japan, up to that time, used only the alphanumeric characters like in other countries, this prototype allowed processing of more than ten thousand Kanji and other characters that are used in the Japanese language.
It allowed punching out IBM cards for more than ten thousand kinds of Japanese characters, using two columns (two punch positions) for each Japanese character, to be fed in the regular IBM card reader for being stored in the computer in two bytes for each Japanese character.
Until that time, the English alphabet and half-width Katakana had been used for computer processing of corporate correspondence, which was quite awkward.
The information of which wire dot to be hit at which point was prepared on the computer side and transmitted to the printer, which made other jobs in the multitasking OS/360-370 to slow down extensively.