This presentation presents an overview and analysis of the legacy Japanese character encodings. We will describe their similarities and differences, how they map to various versions of Unicode and each other, and how they map to JIS character repertoires. For example, how does Shift-JIS compare with IBM CP932 and with Microsoft CP932? What encodings are used on mainframes in Japan, and what are the various vendor-specific variants of these encodings? How do you know what encoding you need to use?

Specifically, the topics covered will be:

• the basics of legacy Japanese character sets and encodings
• the reality behind the confusion between different encodings
• the relations to Unicode
• what developers need to do to cope with various encodings with examples

At the end of this presentation, it is expected that you will have a better understanding of how these encodings relate and how to deal with them when authoring Japanese-language applications.