> I would imagine things begin to improve around 2000 due to the broad adoption of unicode? Yes. I don't remember the exact timing, but it was the switchover t

> I would imagine things begin to improve around 2000 due to the broad adoption of unicode? Yes. I don't remember the exact timing, but it was the switchover to Unicode by Windows and Mac that finally resolved the character encoding conflicts (mostly). I don't know how much attention this got outside Japan, but there was significant opposition here to Unicode for a while from some Japanese intellectuals. Handwritten and, sometimes, typeset Japanese has traditionally allowed for a lot of minor variations in the forms of kanji. A person might write their name with an extra stroke in one character, for example. Some of those variants are ignored in Unicode as well as in the Japanese encodings on which it is based, and some people kicked up a fuss about it in the Japanese press. I remember reading rants accusing Bill Gates of trying to suppress Japanese culture by imposing a homogenized character encoding through Windows. The controversy has long since died down, though there have been efforts to develop more comprehensive character sets of Japanese and other Asian languages, such as TRON Code and Mojikyō: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_(encoding) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_(encoding) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojiky%C5%8D https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojiky%C5%8D