The Mojikyō Institute, chaired by Tadahisa Ishikawa (石川忠久),[1] originally had its character set and related software and data redistributed on CD-ROMs sold in Kinokuniya stores.

Originally a paid proprietary software product, as of 2015, the Mojikyō Institute began to upload its latest releases to Internet Archive as freeware,[7] as a memorial to honor one of its developers, Tokio Furuya (古家時雄), who died that year.

[3] The Mojikyō encoding was created to provide a complete index of characters used in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean writing systems and Vietnamese Chữ Nôm logographic scripts.

Glyphs originating from Mojikyō first appear in a proposal to the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG),[note 8] which is responsible for maintaining all CJK blocks in Unicode,[14][15] on 18 April 2002.

[6] The Unicode Standard's Unihan Database refers to Mojikyō as the "Japanese KOKUJI Collection" (日本国字集),[18] abbreviated "JK".

[19][20] For example, U+2B679 𫙹 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-2B679,[note 10] an ideograph read in Japanese as burizādo (ブリザード, lit.

Mojikyō puts CJKV characters in different blocks according to their traditional Kangxi radical.

[citation needed] Unicode, on the other hand, sorts its CJK into blocks based on how common they are: the most common are generally put into the Basic Multilingual Plane,[note 14] while those that are rare or obscure are put into the Supplementary Planes.

[23] Mere data, sometimes including the shapes of letters, are considered in many jurisdictions to be common property as they do not meet the threshold of originality.