No-sword links to an interesting page titled Unicode in Japan: Guide to a technical and psychological struggle. There’s a lot of useful information in this.

The Web page also touches some on script reform in postwar Japan; for the full story, see Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan: Reading Between the Lines, by J. Marshall Unger. Pinyin Info offers a chapter-long selection from this book.

Other pages on that site include a Unicode tutorial, which is billed as “a page of Unicode terms, FAQs, and mistakes.”

My pet peeve about Unicode is its continuing, incorrect reference to Chinese characters as “ideographs.”