A small addition: Some early/simple Japanese systems actually used single byte encodings. They could only fit the katakana characters, so everything had to be w

A small addition: Some early/simple Japanese systems actually used single byte encodings. They could only fit the katakana characters, so everything had to be written phonetically. It is not very easy to read but works acceptably for short strings. The characters were squished horizontally to take the same space as English letters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-width_kana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-width_kana You can still encounter these in printed receipts from old POS systems. The half-width katakana still exist as separate codepoints in Unicode, and are quite popular in emoji and such.