[tsuraan]

I believe that ISO2022 allows for the full set of japanese names (and has some sort of process for introducing new kanji). That's probably a big part of the reason that Ruby's strings are bytes with an encoding attribute, rather than just being unicode.

[patio11]

Ruby was designed as utility goop for Japanese programmers. Inability to parse/output legacy encodings would have rendered it virtually useless for that, even if legacy encodings were strictly dominated by any available Unicode encoding, which many Japanese programmers would hotly contest.

[nandemo]

The Ruby thing is probably due to the fact that EUC and Shift-JIS were then (and to some extent still are) the prevalent encodings. It's not so much about character sets, after all Unicode includes every kanji defined in ISO-2022. Please see my other comment in this thread.