Very likely Perl didn't have integrated support for Japanese when this was generated. I'm not an expert, and this version was semi-crowd-sourced, so no doubt it's full of inaccuracies.

And it's just for fun.

I came here to inquire about the same thing. The shared page has been last modified 2011-07-28 but currently Perl seems to handle Japanese fine, either via the Encode module (core) or alternatively Unicode::Japanese on CPAN.

Regardless, I'd be interested in knowing of any problems people have had with handling Japanese.

I just stuck the page up as a place-holder for the graph that was played with in 2003/2004.

I'll go change it again to help try to make that clear.

Years back Perl mustn't have had functioning unicode, because I recall programmers working with Japanese text having to use JPerl, a funkily patched version, instead.

People who don't understand unicode ;)