Japanese language and computers

Problems that arise relate to transliteration and romanization, character encoding, and input of Japanese text.

There are several standard methods to encode Japanese characters for use on a computer, including JIS, Shift-JIS, EUC, and Unicode.

[1] Until 2000s, most Japanese emails were in ISO-2022-JP ("JIS encoding") and web pages in Shift-JIS and mobile phones in Japan usually used some form of Extended Unix Code.

This was widely used in systems that were neither powerful enough nor had the storage to handle kanji (including old embedded equipment such as cash registers) because Kana-Kanji conversion required a complicated process, and output in kanji required much memory and high resolution.

However, Shift JIS has the unfortunate property that it often breaks any parser (software that reads the coded text) that is not specifically designed to handle it.

A parser lacking support for Shift JIS will recognize 0x5C 0x82 as an invalid escape sequence, and remove it.

[citation needed] Written Japanese uses several different scripts: kanji (Chinese characters), 2 sets of kana (phonetic syllabaries) and roman letters.

More-advanced IMEs work not by word but by phrase, thus increasing the likelihood of getting the desired characters as the first option presented.

IME implementations may even handle keys for letters unused in any romanization scheme, such as L, converting them to the most appropriate equivalent.

However, CSS level 3 includes a property "writing-mode" which can render tategaki when given the value "vertical-rl" (i.e. top to bottom, right to left).

Japan, which had been the world's second largest market for computers after the United States at the time, was dominated by domestic hardware and software makers such as NEC and Fujitsu.

[9][10] Microsoft Windows 3.1 offered improved Japanese language support which played a part in reducing the grip of domestic PC makers throughout the 1990s.