Re: Japan opposes any proposals with UNICODE is the only

From: Martin J. Duerst (duerst@w3.org)
Date: Thu Apr 27 2000 - 04:33:29 EDT


Hello Gunther,

Having visited Japan many times when Unicode was still new,
and currently being based in Japan, I know a lot of similar
stories, although yours is stronger than most.

The history of Unicode in Japan is quite complicated, and
there are indeed many rumors and sometimes some real concerns.
In most cases, it is not too difficult to address them, but
that may require careful communication and detailed knowledge,
and time.

What you provide in your mail is a start for this. If you
have more information (you can send that privately), maybe
I can help you on.

At 00/04/26 09:09 -0800, Gunther Schadow wrote:
>- The representative from Japan, leader of both HL7 Japan and the
>ISO TC215 delegation made a presentation that included the following
>statement at the end:
>
> Japan opposes any proposals with UNICODE is the only way$BG(B

In some cases, ISO 10646 or JIS X 0221 can help.

>The presentation I have seen puts quite some effort into the argument
>why the CJK unified character set is not sufficient. As it stands I trust
>the argumentation. I know from experience that computer standards
>developed for the general market tend to ignore really tricky real world
>issues that exist. These issues become obvious in healthcare, because
>healthcare deals with people first and computers later.
>
>To give you at least some substance: the argument was made that the
>Unicode CJK characters are insufficient to faithfully write people's
>names, since the various traditions and character reforms in China,
>Korea, and Japan have produced differences that, while they may be
>unimportant in usual writing, are important in name writing. Example
>is Korean nationals living in Japan.

Names are definitely a problem, even in a Japanese. I have heard
a lot of rumors, much too long to list here, but I haven't yet heard
about a case of Korean names vs. Japanese names. In most cases where
the differences between Korean and Japanese writing is serious, there
are actually two different codepoints in ISO 10646.
If you can get some pointers/documentation on what encodings and
set of characters the current Japanese systems use, I could have
a look at it. If you have a pointer to the original presentation,
that would also be of interest.

In some cases, problems can also be handled on a higher level.
For example, in case XML is used, there is the xml:lang
attribute that can be used to distinguish Japanese and Korean.

Regards, Martin.



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