To encode English characters on a computer, ASCII is commonly used. For Japanese characters, there are three common encodings. But ``common'' only in a certain sense, for most browsers don't support any form of Japanese.

Support isn't that difficult, technically, but in this English-centric software world.... sigh.

If your browsers does not support Japanese, this dictionary server can still be useful. It will send Japanese text encoded as individual images... a slow process, but effectively allowing any viewer that supports gif images to ``support'' Japanese.

But it is slow, and if possible, you are encouraged to use WWW browsers that support Japanese, if possible.

Encoding Types

• JIS. Japanese Industrial Standard. The JIS group is more or less the Japan version of ANSI (American National Standards Institute), with a touch of UL (Underwriter's Laboratory, a private corporation) thrown in. The term ``JIS'' is used in the computing community to refer to their encoding standard. It is probably the best for communication purposes, as it's a 7-bit code more or less using escape sequences and ASCII characters to encode the Japanese.
  
  You are STRONGLY encouraged to use JIS if you can. In particular, most browsers will recognized all three encoding types, but only for JIS will it automatically switch to a Japanese font when it needs to.
  
  
• EUC. Extended Unix Code. Pronounced ``Eee you see''. Actually, a subset of a more widely-scoped (but under-implemented) method of encoding many of the worlds various languages. This server works with EUC internally. EUC is more or less JIS without the escape sequences, and the 8th bit turned on in encoded bytes. Sometimes this can be written as EUC-JP.
  
  
• Shift-JIS. Commonly known as Shit-JIS, this piece of Microsoft brain damage is unfortunately the encoding commonly used on PCs.
  
  
• UNICODE. Huh, I thought you said three? Well, Unicode is another standard developed by The Unicode Consortium which is gaining popularity. Most of the world's written languages can be represented with Unicode. On the web, Unicode is written using UTF-8, which this server can display.

Here are samples of each encoding you might use to see if anything is supported on your system.

The last word on Japanese Encodings