On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 09:18:15AM +0900,
 Henry Nelson <netb@yuba.kcn.ne.jp> wrote 
 a message of 29 lines which said:

> I don't know the technical issues, 

On this subject, here is a very good paper for the Unix
people. Executive summary: you need to change many things, both in
kernel and in applications.

http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/utf.html

    Rob Pike
    Ken Thompson


    rob,ken@plan9.bell-labs.com

    ABSTRACT

NOTE: Originally appeared, in a slightly different form, in Proc. of the Winter 1993 USENIX Conf., pp. 43-50, San Diego

Plan 9 from Bell Labs has recently been converted from ASCII to an ASCII-compatible variant of the Unicode Standard, a 16-bit character set. In this paper we explain the reasons for the change, describe the character set and representation we chose, and present the programming models and software changes that support the new text format. Although we stopped short of full internationalization­for example, system error messages are in Unixese, not Japanese­we believe Plan 9 is the first system to treat the representation of all major languages on a uniform, equal footing throughout all its software.