The Internet in Japan

There are several different versions of the Japanese character set, three popular ones being shift_jis, x-euc-jp, and iso-2022-jp. Depending on the charset encoding that you use in your webpage a browser, especially older ones, will have massive problems displaying the text. Also, having your source strings and then converting between the charactersets renders them into meaningless babble. If you take a survey of popular? results from the search engines you can see that the three popular charsets mentioned above are all in play, so there dosent seem to be any particular problem in using any of the encodings and getting ranked. However, it’s not impossible that the older sets like EUC and shift_jis will become obsolete, while the UTF8 charset looks set to become the standard for non-roman sets. Google itself uses UTF8. In summary, although search engines don’t seem to have a problem with any of there charsets, you need to think about browser compatibility and futureproofing which is why I would recommend all Japanese websites to be encoded in UTF8.