> It depends. Your categorization is too coarse.

Yes it is course b/c that is not my area of expertise. Feel free to inject any information here.

> I didn't know these 'facts'. Can you give me the details? Just out of curiosity, how did you know Shift-JIS is popular than UTF-8?

Well I don't have any hard statistics to back up my statements. They are all simply personal observations.

However in Japan "moji-bake" (character encoding error) is an everyday phrase. Shift-JIS is mostly to blame. I think that's enough to show that it's still widely used.

My Japanese mobile phone would occasionally silently fail to display an email message (forwarded to the phone's Softbank address, naturally, since I couldn't get data access without a contract plan) because of the character encoding.

And then there's the fact that you can't get a prepaid SIM in Japan without buying a phone to go with it. And the fact that Softbank is the only prepaid provider. And the fact that I wasn't legally supposed to have a prepaid phone anyway, because I didn't have an Alien Registration Card but was lucky enough to find a discount store that would overlook that.

Japan is VERY technologically advanced, but they often do things in a way that lacks any consideration for the world outside of their islands. The mobile phone debacle is a perfect example of this, because it affects so few Japanese directly. "Open" platforms like Linux, the Internet, and even Windows are largely regarded as hobbyist items, while Docomo and Softbank's closed, curated networks are reality for most Japanese. The recent film "Summer Wars" is an excellent expression of this.

Shift-JIS is still widely used here, how widely used I don't know and I don't work on projects where we deal with character encoding so much anymore so I don't bother to keep up. But it does make some sense that it would still be used because, if you stick to Japanese characters, it is more space-efficient than UTF-8.