What issues lead people to use Japanese-specific encodings rather than Unicode?

Posted by Nicolas Raoul on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Nicolas Raoul
Published on 2011-06-08T06:36:15Z Indexed on 2012/09/25 9:49 UTC
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legacy

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unicode

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character-encoding

At work I come across a lot of Japanese text files in Shift-JIS and other encodings. It causes many mojibake (unreadable character) problems for all computer users. Unicode was intended to solve this sort of problem by defining a single character set for all languages, and the UTF-8 serialization is recommended for use on the Internet. So why doesn't everybody switch from Japanese-specific encodings to UTF-8? What issues with or disadvantages of UTF-8 are holding people back?

EDIT: The W3C lists some known problems with Unicode, could this be a reason too?

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