The Ruby thing is probably due to the fact that EUC and Shift-JIS were then (and to some extent still are) the prevalent encodings. It's not so much about chara

The Ruby thing is probably due to the fact that EUC and Shift-JIS were then (and to some extent still are) the prevalent encodings. It's not so much about character sets, after all Unicode includes every kanji defined in ISO-2022. Please see my other comment in this thread.