Japanese Language Links

picture of kozuka

Japanese Characters and Computers

The Japanese language can be represented on computers/web-sites etc in three ways:

1. Graphical representations of kanji (e.g. bmp, gif, jpeg, tif etc)

The advantage of this is that anyone can see the kanji without the the need for specialised software. A major disadvantage is that large amounts of memory are required if lots of kanji are shown. Another disadvantage is that 'what you see is all you get'. Each character is a 'picture'. The original kanji cannot be converted for use with different fonts

2. Substitution of the ASCII character set

This involves substituting a Japanese character for each ascii character. The limitation of this method is that there are around 6000 kanji characters in use (13,000 if the uncommon kanji are included), and only around 224 usable ascii characters in each font, so a separate character font has to be maintained for each group of 224 kanji. Access to the kanji has to be by means of a hardcopy index, with much font changing. An advantage of this approach is that kanji can be inserted (slowly and laboriously) into English word processing and DTP software.

3. Double-byte Coding

Computers in Japan use one of several systems of 'double-byte' coding. Put simply, these use the equivalent of two ascii characters to represent one kanji or kana.

Examples of these coding systems are: JIS, shiftJIS and EUC.

Japanese characters are numbered using JIS (Japanese International Standard) character set, which applies to all the above double-byte systems. This means that the same JIS number applies for a given kanji in JIS, shiftJIS and EUC.

These systems require special software to view the data as kanji/kana, but such software is available freely on the 'net. There are shareware and full commercial versions too. As when using ascii, double-byte coded kanji can be viewed using whatever fonts the viewer has installed.

The most popular FREEWARE Japanese Word Processor for Windows 3.x/95/98 is JWP 1.31 written by Stephen Chung. It incorporates EDICT which is the largest Japanese dictionary available, and includes several sophisticated kanji look-up engines. EDICT was developed and is maintained by Professor Jim Breen of Monash University in Australia.

JWP 1.31 is able to read documents in all the above coding formats.

Sample JWP 1.31 text

sample image of Japanese characters

JWP 1.31 can be downloaded from:

Australia http://ftp.monash.edu.au:/pub/nihongo/