> They just couldn't use SMS because it can't handle enough 8 bit characters to string together a whole sentence. Not sure how to interpret this .... SMS work

> They just couldn't use SMS because it can't handle enough 8 bit characters to string together a whole sentence. Not sure how to interpret this .... SMS works fine on all Japanese cellphones, between carriers, and even to other countries (I've texted to someone in Korea, though only ascii was really reliable... CJK characters sometimes worked, but sometimes got trashed). Because of the encoding used (some variant of ISO-2022-JP with custom code points for emoji), and probably some additional metadata, the maximum length of messages is reduced; for instance, on my phone, it's 100 ascii chars, or 50 CJK characters or emoji. However, Japanese can be very dense, much denser than English on a character-count level, depending on which words you use, so the smaller character limit isn't always a horrible limitation. The main issue is that things like verb conjugations and polite forms can realllly bloat things up, increasing word lengths dramatically. So there's constant pressure when using SMS in Japanese to (1) use very informal language, (2) be grammatically incorrect, and (3) use emoji for everything... But hey, texting is generally between friends anyway, so the above aren't such a problem, and indeed, probably add to the sense of informality, which can be a good thing.