What character sets should be considered safe for Japanese communication?
This depends on who you’re communicating with. PC systems use Microsoft’s codepage 932, a Shift-JIS encoding and character set which should be considered standard for PC documents. Mainframes and old Unix systems, such as are often found in the Japanese government and large companies, usually handle only JIX X 0208, often with unique extensions. These two levels (CP932 and JIS X 0208) are probably the most important levels to bear in mind. Modern software based on Windows, Java or XML will usually be using Unicode as UTF-8 or UTF-16, and in practise a high proportion of Japanese text is handled in Unicode already simply because it is handled on Windows.
