JIS means Japanese Industrial Standard.
The new Japanese Industrial Standard for a coded character set, JIS X0213
(an enhancement to the current X0208), has been established on January the
21th, 2000.
(Don't now wich version of JIS MSX uses, but probably an older definition of
the character set)
Each Japanese character is expressed in the computer by two consecutive
bytes and is shown on the screen occupying two alphanumeric positions. The
Japanese character set defines 6,355 Kanji (Chinese) characters for computer
processing (JIS Code). In comparison, 7,445 characters (GB Code) and 13,523
characters (Big 5 code) are used in mainland China and Taiwan/Hongkong,
respectively.
Source:
http://www.threeweb.ad.jp/logos/japanese.html
http://jcs.aa.tufs.ac.jp/new-jis/index-e.htm
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