Japanese Character Sets and Encoding

In Japanese texts apart from latin characters (Romanji) the two Japanese syllable characters Hiragana and Katakana and more than 12,000 Chinese characters (Kanji) are needed. For kana and kanji characters there are the Japanese industry standards. The Japanese industry standard for encoding the east asian characters is called the "Code of the Japanese Graphic Character Set for Information Interchange", also known as JIS C 6226.

JIS X 0201
In 1969 JIS C 6220-1969 was published. It contains the japanese syllable characters (Kanas) and the latin characters.

JIS 1+2 = JIS C 6226-1978
January 1, 1978, JIS C 6226-1978, the initial JIS specification was published. JIS contains 6353 Kanji characters.
The first plane, ranging from area 16 to 47, comprises 2965 characters, and the second plane, ranging from area 48 to 84, has 3388 characters.

JIS X 0208
The initial JIS specification JIS C 6226-1978 was revised in 1983. In addition, after some Chinese characters were added and replaced, JIS X 0208-1990, established in September 1990, includes 6879 Chinese characters, which are often used.
JIS X 0208 was again revised in January 1997 and published as JIS X 0208-1997. It mainly defines graphic character sets, and in addition to kanas and symbols, there are 6355 Chinese characters.
For the first JIS planes that are used more often, there are 2,965 Chinese characters.
The 3390 second JIS planes are less used; however, the fonts are often used in outdated Chinese characters for people's names.

JIS X 0212
To supplement people's names and outdated Chinese characters not included in the JIS X 0208, 6067 supplementary Chinese character sets (5801 Chinese characters and 266 symbols) were established in October 1990, and the sets are known as JIS X 0212-1990.
Adding to JIS X 0208, there are 12,946 standard characters, among which are 12,156 Chinese characters, available.

JIS X 0213
After the JIS X 0208-1997 was published, the coding of the third and forth planes of Chinese characters were undergoing, and JIS X 0213-2000 was established on January 20, 2000, accordingly. In addition to the 6879 characters in JIS X 0208, JIS X 0213 is added with 4,344 characters. Some numeric symbols with circles outside and the Chinese characters of the people's names rarely seen are incorporated into JIS specification. The total characters are 11,223. For the third JIS planes, there are 1,249 Chinese characters and 659 symbols, and for the forth JIS planes, 2,436 Chinese characters are included.