JIS X 0201, a

Japanese Industrial Standard are the standards used for industrial activities in Japan, coordinated by the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC) and published by the Japanese Standards Association (JSA). The JISC is composed of many nationwide committees and play ...

developed in 1969 (then called JIS C 6220 until the JIS category reform), was the first Japanese electronic

character set Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

to become widely used. It is either a 7-bit encoding or an 8-bit encoding, although the 8-bit form is dominant for modern use (or was until

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

, e.g.

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of ...

took over). The full name of this standard is ''7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets for information interchange'' (). The first 96 codes comprise an

ISO 646 ISO/IEC 646 is a set of ISO/IEC standards, described as ''Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange'' and developed in cooperation with ASCII at least since 1964. Since its first edition in ...

variant, mostly following

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

with some differences, while the second 96 character codes represent the phonetic Japanese

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...

signs. Since the encoding does not provide any way to express

hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrast ...

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...

, it is only capable of expressing simplified written Japanese. Nevertheless, it is possible to express, at least phonetically, the full range of sounds in the language. In the 1970s, this was acceptable for media such as text mode computer terminals, telegrams, receipts or other electronically handled data. JIS X 0201 was supplanted by subsequent encodings such as

Shift JIS Shift JIS (Shift Japanese Industrial Standards, also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjuncti ...

(which combines this standard and

JIS X 0208 JIS X 0208 is a 2-byte character set specified as a Japanese Industrial Standards, Japanese Industrial Standard, containing 6879 graphic characters suitable for writing text, place names, personal names, and so forth in the Japanese language. Th ...

) and later

History

The

Comite Consultatif International Telephonique et Telegraphique The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three sectors (divisions or units) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It is responsible for coordinating standards for telecommunications and Information Comm ...

(CCITT) introduced the International Telegraph Alphabet No.2 (ITA2) code as an international standard, which was the 5-bit Latin encoding. Most countries have their own national standards based on this. In Japan, the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) standardized it as the 6-bit character codes of JIS C 0803-1961 (''Keyboard layout and codes for teleprinters''), which combined with katakana characters. However, it didn't match the industry requirements because the character map was small, and the code layout was impractical. The AIST considered a practical character encoding to replace various codes used in Japan. In 1963, ISO introduced a draft of ISO R 646 (''6 and 7-bit coded character sets for information processing interchange''). AIST committed the conjunction of ISO R 646 and katakana mapping to the

Information Processing Society of Japan The Information Processing Society of Japan ("IPSJ") is a Japanese learned society for computing. Founded in 1960, it is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. IPSJ publishes a magazine and several professional journals mainly in Japanese, and sponsors c ...

(IPSJ). IPSJ formed the code standardization committee. The committee didn't adopt the 6-bit form of ISO's draft because the katakana set couldn't fit into its character map. The early JIS draft mapped small katakana characters next to each of their normal katakana characters. It was considered to be convenient for sorting by

Gojūon In the Japanese language, the is a traditional system ordering kana characters by their component phonemes, roughly analogous to alphabetical order. The "fifty" (''gojū'') in its name refers to the 5×10 grid in which the characters are disp ...

order. Some committee members criticized it would complicate the mechanic of keyboards which only handled normal katakana characters. The later draft mapped small katakana characters to positions 0xA7-0xAF. In 1966, the fourth draft of ISO specified the national currency symbol at 0x24, and the JIS committee planned to map the

yen sign The yen and yuan sign, ¥, is a currency sign used for the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan currencies when writing in Latin scripts. This monetary symbol resembles a Latin letter Y with a single or double horizontal stroke. The symbol is usua ...

. The first edition of ISO 646 was published in 1967. It specified the ASCII's

dollar sign The dollar sign, also known as peso sign, is a symbol consisting of a capital " S" crossed with one or two vertical strokes ($ or ), used to indicate the unit of various currencies around the world, including most currencies denominated "p ...

0x24 as an invariant character, so the JIS committee decided to replace the ASCII's

backslash The backslash is a typographical mark used mainly in computing and mathematics. It is the mirror image of the common slash . It is a relatively recent mark, first documented in the 1930s. History , efforts to identify either the origin of ...

0x5c (one of variant characters) with the yen sign. JIS C 6220 (''Codes for information interchange'', 情報交換用符号) was published in 1969. Its number was changed to JIS X 0201 due to the JIS category reform in 1987, and the name was changed to ''7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets for information interchange'' (7ビット及び8ビットの情報交換用符号化文字集合) in the 1990 edition. The character set of JIS X 0201 had been widely used in Japan. The Nationwide Banking Data Communication System (全国銀行データ通信システム), the largest funds transfer system in Japan, was established in 1973. Transaction messages between banks used a subset of JIS X 0201. The system was used until 2018, and it was replaced by the ZEDI (The Nationwide Banking Electronic Data Interchange System, 全銀EDIシステム) which could handle hiragana and kanji characters. In 1978, the JIS C 6226 (

) 2-byte character set was developed to express hiragana and kanji characters. It includes katakana characters, but their codes and layout are different from JIS X 0201. Computer manufacturers developed their own extensions of JIS X 0208 to retain compatibility with JIS X 0201. In 1982, the

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

Kanji encoding scheme ( Codepage 932 of

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

) and

Digital Research Digital Research, Inc. (DR or DRI) was a company created by Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit systems like MP/M, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser DOS, DOS Plus, DR DOS and Gr ...

's SJC26 (for Japanese CP/M-86) were developed to combine JIS X 0201 single-byte encoding and JIS X 0208 double byte encoding without

shift out Shift Out (SO) and Shift In (SI) are ASCII control characters 14 and 15, respectively (0x0E and 0x0F). These are sometimes also called "Control-N" and "Control-O". The original meaning of those characters provided a way to shift a coloured ribbon ...

and

shift in Shift Out (SO) and Shift In (SI) are ASCII control characters 14 and 15, respectively (0x0E and 0x0F). These are sometimes also called "Control-N" and "Control-O". The original meaning of those characters provided a way to shift a coloured ribbon ...

characters. They were called

, which became the industrial standard for personal computers.

Implementation details

The first half (Roman set) of JIS X 0201 constitutes a Japanese variant of

, amounting to

with

(\) and

tilde The tilde () or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin '' titulus'', meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) i ...

(~) replaced by

yen The is the official currency of Japan. It is the third-most traded currency in the foreign exchange market, after the United States dollar (US$) and the euro. It is also widely used as a third reserve currency after the US dollar and the e ...

(¥) and

overline An overline, overscore, or overbar, is a typographical feature of a horizontal line drawn immediately above the text. In old mathematical notation, an overline was called a '' vinculum'', a notation for grouping symbols which is expressed in m ...

(‾), while the second half (Kana set) consists mainly of

Control character In computing and telecommunication, a control character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point (a number) in a character set, that does not represent a written symbol. They are used as in-band signaling to cause effects other than the ...

s are specified in JIS X 0211. In the 7-bit format, the

control character (0x0E) switches to the Kana set and

(0x0F) switches to the Roman set. In the 8-bit format, given in the chart below, bytes with the most significant bit set (i.e. 0x80–0xFF) are used for the Kana set and bytes with it unset (i.e. 0x00–0x7F) are used otherwise. Names used specifically for the 7-bit Roman set include "JISCII", "JIS Roman", "ISO646-JP", "JIS C6220-1969-ro", "Japanese-Roman", "Japan 7-Bit Latin", and "ISO-IR-14", whereas names used specifically for the 7-bit Kana set include "ISO-IR-13", "JIS C6220-1969-jp" and "x0201-7". The substitution of the yen symbol for backslash can make paths on

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

-based computers with Japanese support display strangely, like "C:¥Program Files¥", for example. Another similar problem is C programming language's control characters of

string literal A string literal or anonymous string is a string value in the source code of a computer program. Modern programming languages commonly use a quoted sequence of characters, formally " bracketed delimiters", as in x = "foo", where "foo" is a string ...

s, like printf("Hello, world.¥n");.

Codepage layout

The following table is the original 8-bit coded character set of JIS X 0201 (with the kana set indicated by bytes with the high bit set).

As part of Shift JIS

Following is the mapping used for JIS X 0201 as part of

, i.e. showing the 8-bit form of JIS X 0201, and mapping the Katakana characters to the

Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms In CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) computing, graphic characters are traditionally classed into fullwidth (in Taiwan and Hong Kong: 全形; in CJK: 全角) and halfwidth (in Taiwan and Hong Kong: 半形; in CJK: 半角) characters. Unlik ...

block (which in turn derives its half width kana layout from JIS X 0201).

Alternative mapping of katakana

The basic

ISO-2022-JP ISO/IEC 2022 ''Information technology—Character code structure and extension techniques'', is an ISO/ IEC standard (equivalent to the ECMA standard ECMA-35, the ANSI standard ANSI X3.41 and the Japanese Industrial Standard JIS X 0202) in the ...

profile does not permit the Kana set of JIS X 0201, only the Roman set and

(although ISO 2022 / JIS X 0202 itself permits it). Accordingly, when converting JIS X 0201 katakana (or Unicode

half-width kana are katakana characters displayed compressed at half their normal width (a 1:2 aspect ratio), instead of the usual square (1:1) aspect ratio. For example, the usual (full-width) form of the katakana ''ka'' is カ while the half-width form is ｶ. ...

, which use the same layout) to ISO-2022-JP, the following mapping or transformation is often used.} This allows the kana to be converted to JIS X 0208. In theory, this mapping is equally correct, as JIS X 0201 itself does not specify display width, although in practice (and especially in duospaced environments) JIS X 0201 is used for half-width katakana. For ease of comparison with the chart above, the mapping is shown below over the JIS X 0201 katakana encoding and with the high bit set.

Variants and extensions

Shift JIS

IBM's implementations

Code page 897 is IBM's implementation of the 8-bit form of JIS X 0201. It includes several additional graphical characters in the

C0 control characters The C0 and C1 control code or control character sets define control codes for use in text by computer systems that use ASCII and derivatives of ASCII. The codes represent additional information about the text, such as the position of a cursor, ...

area, and the code points in question may be used as control characters or graphical characters depending on the context, similarly in concept to

OEM-US Code page 437 (CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (diacri ...

, but with different graphical characters. The C0 rows are shown below. IBM also designate pure 8-bit JIS X 0201 without these control code replacements as Code page 1139. Another variant, including a smaller subset of these C0 replacement graphics (including only the box drawing characters in 0x01–06, 0x11, 0x15–17 and 0x19 and the line/arrow characters in 0x1B–1F), but using a different style of up-arrow () at 0x1C, is designated Code page 1086. IBM also implements the 7-bit Roman set of JIS X 0201 as Code page 895 and the 7-bit Kana set as Code page 896 for use as

ISO 2022 ISO/IEC 2022 ''Information technology—Character code structure and extension techniques'', is an ISO/ IEC standard (equivalent to the ECMA standard ECMA-35, the ANSI standard ANSI X3.41 and the Japanese Industrial Standard JIS X 0202) in the ...

EUC-JP Extended Unix Code (EUC) is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese. The most commonly used EUC codes are variable-length encodings with a character belonging to an compliant coded char ...

code-sets. Code page 896, in addition to standard JIS X 0201 assignments, defines five additional assignments, shown below. Although use of these extended characters is not permitted by the associated

CCSID A CCSID (coded character set identifier) is a 16-bit number that represents a particular encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several encoding (so called "transformation") forms, like UTF-8, UTF-16 and U ...

896, they are permitted by the alternative CCSID 4992. IBM's Code page 1041 is an extended version of Code page 897, encoding these five IBM extended characters in alternative locations which are compatible with

(respectively 0x80, 0xA0, 0xFD, 0xFE and 0xFF). Code page 911, another extended 8-bit JIS X 0201 implementation (which uses the same C0 replacement graphics as Code page 1086) encodes the pound (sterling) sign ( £) at 0xE1, similarly to Code page 896 with the eight bit set, but differs by encoding the cent sign ( ¢) at 0xE2 and the not-sign ( ¬) at 0xE3. IBM's Code page 903 is encoded for use as the single byte component of certain

simplified Chinese Simplification, Simplify, or Simplified may refer to: Mathematics Simplification is the process of replacing a mathematical expression by an equivalent one, that is simpler (usually shorter), for example * Simplification of algebraic expressions, ...

character encodings, accompanying the

-based Code page 904 used with

traditional Chinese A tradition is a belief or behavior (folk custom) passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examples include holidays ...

encodings. Despite this, Code page 903 follows ISO 646-JP / the Roman half of JIS X 0201, in that it replaces the ASCII backslash 0x5C (rather than the ASCII dollar sign 0x24 as in GB 1988 /

ISO 646-CN ISO/IEC 646 is a set of ISO/ IEC standards, described as ''Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange'' and developed in cooperation with ASCII at least since 1964. Since its first edition in ...

) with the yen/yuan sign. It also uses the same C0 replacement graphics as code page 897. Code page 1042 extends code page 903 with the pound (sterling) sign at 0x80, and the not-sign, backslash and tilde at their Code page 1041 locations.

Others

File:PC-8001 character set.png, NEC PC-8001 (1979) character set as rendered in the 8×8 pixel font File:NEC-C-6220-paths.svg,

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...

variant used on the PC98 series. File:Charset.gif, Hitachi variant used on the HD44780.

Footnotes

References

External links

Diagram of JIS X 0201 (as 7-bit code sets)
{{character encoding Encodings of Japanese JIS standards Computer-related introductions in 1969