Outside of embedded software this really isn't that much of a problem any more. Taking a random Wikipedia page as sample I get 46kB (UTF-8) versus 35kB (Shift-

Outside of embedded software this really isn't that much of a problem any more. Taking a random Wikipedia page as sample I get 46kB (UTF-8) versus 35kB (Shift-JIS). A random Japanese text from Project Gutenberg is roughly ⅔ of the size of the UTF-8 text in Shift-JIS. Those are impressive enough numbers, but add just a single photograph to the Wikipedia page and it doesn't matter at all. Text is just pretty efficient, even if you use an encoding that supports every language in the world.