JIS X 0208

JIS X 0208 is a 2-byte character set specified as a Japanese Industrial Standard, containing 6879 graphic characters suitable for writing text, place names, personal names, and so forth in the Japanese language. The official title of the current standard is 7-bit and 8-bit double byte coded KANJI sets for information interchange (7ビット及び8ビットの2バイト情報交換用符号化漢字集合, Nana-Bitto Oyobi Hachi-Bitto no Ni-Baito Jōhō Kōkan'yō Fugōka Kanji Shūgō^?). It was originally established as JIS C 6226 in 1978, and has been revised in 1983, 1990, and 1997.

The character set JIS X 0208 establishes is primarily for the purpose of information interchange (情報交換, jōhō kōkan^?) between data processing systems and the devices connected to them, or mutually between data communication systems. This character set can be used for data processing and text processing.

Partial implementations of the character set are not compatible. Because there are places where such things have happened as the original drafting committee of the first standard taking care to separate things between level 1 and level 2 and the second standard then shuffling some itaiji among the level, at least in the first and second standards, it is conjectured that non-kanji and level 1-only implementations were hypothesized at those times. However, such implementations have never been specified as compatible.

Even though there are provisions in the JIS X 0208:1997 standard concerning compatibility, at the present time, it is generally considered that this standard neither certifies compatibility nor is it an official manufacturing standard that amounts to a declaration of self-compatibility. Consequently, de facto, JIS X 0208-“compatible” products are not considered to exist. Terminology such as “conformant” (準拠, junkyo^?) and “corresponding” (対応, taiō^?) is included in JIS X 0208, but the semantics of these terms vary from person to person.

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