On Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 03:55 , John H. Jenkins wrote: > There's an issue because Ohta-san (and a few others) hate Unicode with > a passion. This is an old argument which has been made by a number of > Japanese for years, insulted that a bunch of American engineers presume > to design a system to display Japanese and unifying it with Chinese. > Most Japanese disagree with them, and the resistance to Unicode even in > Japan is decreasing as engineers there see that it doesn't really mean > American (or Chinese) cultural imperialism. Unfortunately, Ohta-san > can still get himself a hearing on a number of Internet-related > committees.
How can you be so sure that "Most Japanese disagree"? Have you actually taken a poll? I happen to be a Japanese and even I am not sure how much beloved or hated Unicode is here. Isn't this kind of attitude that makes people like Ohta-san angry? Don't take me as an Anti-Unicodist (as a matter of fact, I am a maintainer of Encode module of Perl). I second the philosophy of a single character encoding that (tries to) covers as many worlds as possible. It is its implementations and policies that I can't help raising my eyebrows. To me Unicode Consortium has already showed a big incompetence when it introduced Surrogate Pair.... What was Han Unification for after all? Dan the Man with Too Many Encodings to Support
