Eh, most Japanese people don't know/care about the problem of Han unification. It's mostly because of the legacy data. The thing is that ASCII and UTF-8 is kind

Eh, most Japanese people don't know/care about the problem of Han unification. It's mostly because of the legacy data. The thing is that ASCII and UTF-8 is kinda compatible with minor annoyances, while Shift JIS and UTF-8 are entirely different. People don't want to convert a trove of documents to another encoding which might not be supported yet in some apps. Slow software upgrade is another reason. As someone else pointed out, the default encoding of Windows is still Shift JIS, which is totally understandable for compatibility sake. Edit: Besides, a TTF font doesn't have to always use Unicode internally. It supports an arbitrary mapping from bytes (could be in UTF-8 or SJIS) to a glyph number. People who really care about the looks (i.e. printing) have been using a charset for each specific language, such as Adobe-Japan1, which is different from both UTF-8 or Shift JIS.