Random sample of some websites: - Rakuten Bank -> Shift JIS - NHK, the Ministry of Health and Labor Welfare, yahoo japan -> UTF-8 I don't really really know, b

Random sample of some websites: - Rakuten Bank -> Shift JIS - NHK, the Ministry of Health and Labor Welfare, yahoo japan -> UTF-8 I don't really really know, but this random yahoo answers [0] page seems to agree with me that really you're gonna use UTF-8 for new stuff in general One point that answer brings up that I hadn't thought of: older flipphones would have good shift-JIS support but not necessarily good unicode support My guess is that "text as images" might partly be that, partly what you are saying in a legacy sense, and also partly for the same reason old sites in the US would do that: to make something look the way you want and you already have a photoshop render [0]: https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1487980789 https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q14...