use of roman alphabet in japanese technology
August 9, 2005 12:14 PM   Subscribe

I'm a bit ignorant as regards Japan and all things Japanese, and am not quite sure where to start. But I have some very specific questions that I hope MeFi might help with, having to do with use of the Roman alphabet for electronic communications, in Japan. How do email addresses work? URLs?

That is, are all email addresses in the Roman alphabet? Does the email then switch to Kanji/Katekana/etc in the body of the mail? Do Japanese cell phones handle Roman alphabets seamlessly? Could you send an email to a Japanese email that integrates both character sets? Would all phones be able to handle it?

I'm asking for a project we're getting ready to implement there. If anyone has any definitive answers on these types of questions, it would be a great help. Thanks!
posted by cloudscratcher to Travel & Transportation (6 answers total)
 
Best answer: From my experience:

1) All e-mail addresses and URLs are currently in the roman alphabet.
2) Cell phones can handle combinations of Japanese and Roman characters just fine, as can all e-mail that I've had experience with (hotmail & yahoo Japan).
3) As far as I know, handling both character sets should be standard for most phones. The cheapo phone I used when I was over there handled it just fine, and I don't see why other phones wouldn't be able to do it.

Hope this helps, let me know if you need any more information.
posted by C^3 at 12:28 PM on August 9, 2005


Non-roman characters are possible in domain names, thanks to internationalized domain names, but they aren't very widespread. Some projects, such as Firefox have even considered lessening support for it because it can be used to spoof the names of legitimate sites.
posted by zsazsa at 12:56 PM on August 9, 2005


Agree with both above.

Regarding email addresses and URLs: they have been almost exclusively in the roman alphabet up until now, but things have recently started to change with wider Unicode compliance and standardization as well as the International Domain Names thing. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing a rise in kana/kanji characters in email and url addresses soon since most operating systems and software can support it now.
posted by p3t3 at 1:27 PM on August 9, 2005


As far as the body of an email sent to a Japanese platform, I'm pretty sure you'll never have trouble with that. The roman character set is more or less universally supported, and modern written Japanese frequently has fragments of roman text strewn in its midst. You don't have to worry about any weird conversions taking place, either.
posted by squidlarkin at 1:42 PM on August 9, 2005


Best answer: I'll confirm all of the above. Japanese cellphones can handle Roman characters, no problem, in addition to Japanese script. e-mail can mix whatever characters you want, but you need to mind the encoding, as there are three different forms of encoding for Japanese (New JIS, Shift JIS, and EUC-JP), not to mention Unicode. Typically, Japanese e-mail is sent in New JIS, because that doesn't use the 8th bit of the byte (and is therefore safe to pass through dumb MTAs that assume the high bit is irrelevant). All Japanese encodings can be viewed as supersets of ASCII. Historically, the header region has been all-ASCII (there may be an RFC on this), but the body can be whatever. I agree that we may start seeing internationalized e-mail addresses, but I'll be surprised if they really catch on, because they'll be completely opaque to non-Japanese-capable readers.

If you want the ultimate source of information on this stuff, pick up Ken Lunde's "Understanding CJKV Information Processing" (O'Reilly). It's a little dated (nothing on IRLs, for example), but still very extensive.
posted by adamrice at 2:39 PM on August 9, 2005


Response by poster: I don't know if it's ok to say so in the comments here, but I'm very grateful to all of you. It totally answers my questions, and best of all, it's the news I wanted to hear.

So, thanks!
posted by cloudscratcher at 3:48 PM on August 9, 2005


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