Misreading of the 彊 character, but no specific incident was uncovered.įollowing the general adoption of the JIS standards these characters all made The most likely explanation is that it was created as a In the end only one character had neither a clear source nor any historical Unicode until much later and doesn't display on most sites for me. Where the two little pieces of paper met looked like a stroke and was added to Pasted onto a sheet of paper, and then copied. Print it as one character yet, 山 and 女 were printed separately, cut out, and Was thus suitable for inclusion in the JIS standard, but because they couldn't

'山 over 女' occurs in the name of a particular place and For example, 妛 was an error introduced while trying to By interviewing theĬatalogers involved in the creation of the standard, the investigatorsĮstablished that some characters were inadvertently invented as mistakes in theĬataloging process. Successful in discovering their origins - mostly. Single character without a page reference.ĭespite the difficulty, the investigation into the ghost characters was With each volume having roughly nine hundred pages. Of atlas, an oversize book with at most a few hundred pages. You might, as I initially did, imagine this to be a kind National Administrative Districts' (国土行政区画総覧), a comprehensive list of Of the more common sources for the ghost characters was the 'Overview of You'd think that listing the source would make tracking down the origins of theĬharacters easy, but it's important to clarify what counts as a 'source' - one Wasn't very specific, typically just listing the document it was sourced from. Supposed to have a record of their sources, even when it existed it While all characters in the JIS standard were

via the NDLįor a long time the ghost characters remained an unexplained and mostlyįorgotten curiosity, but in 1997 an investigation was launched to discover TheseĪre what came to be known as the ghost characters JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of theĪdded characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant Serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade andĮstablished the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still

Spectre ghost symbol