Unless you're using an OS older than Windows 2000, or a linux distro from the 2000s, where some form of Unicode was not the default encoding, or maybe an ancien

Unless you're using an OS older than Windows 2000, or a linux distro from the 2000s, where some form of Unicode was not the default encoding, or maybe an ancient Win32 program compiled without "UNICODE" defined, it shouldn't be a problem. I specifically work with a lot of Japanese software and have not seen this problem in many years. And even back in the mid 2000s, the only real problems I saw otherwise, were things like malformed html pages that assumed a specific encoding that they wouldn't tell you, or an MP3 file with an ID3 tag with CP932 shoved into it against the (v1) spec. I also disagree with the author that Shift-JIS can be "good enough" hueristically detected due to its use of both 7 and 8-bit characters in both the high and low bytes to mean different things depending on what character is actually intended. Even string searching requires a complex custom-made version just for Shift-JIS handling.