Shift JIS

Shift JIS (also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by the Japanese company ASCII Corporation in conjunction with Microsoft and standardized as JIS X 0208 Appendix 1. Shift JIS is based on character sets defined within JIS standards JIS X 0201:1997 (for the single-byte characters) and JIS X 0208:1997 (for the double-byte characters). As of March 2026, 0.05% of surveyed web pages used Shift JIS (actually decoded as its superset Windows-31J encoding), a decline from 1.3% in July 2014. Shift JIS is the third-most declared character encoding for Japanese websites (though in effect it means its superset Windows-31J is used, so it is third-most popular), declared by 1.0% of sites in the .jp domain, while UTF-8 is used by 99.1% of Japanese websites. Shift JIS is also sometimes used in QR codes, though UTF-8 is often preferred.