>>> Japanese text can only be represented with unicode.
>
>That is incorrect. Guess again <s>. Were it so, there would not be Japanese Windows 3.1, nor a Japanese DOS. Unicode support in Windows came after the launch of Windows 95...
>
>JIS, Katakana, and EUC (and possibly others) are all n-byte.
>

Not the first time I've been wrong...

Thanks for jumping in.