Modern Japanese writing consists of several dozen hiragana and katakana characters, as well as over two thousand kanji characters.

CJK characters and fonts

When using CJK characters (Chinese, Japanese, or Korean) it is important to use a Japanese font. The same character will appear slightly differently in each language.

Vertical Writing on the Web

Although this is no longer common, Japanese can be written vertically, top-to-bottom. Two CSS properties should be used, though they are not supported in all browsers:

Alternate encodings

Due to the issues caused by Unicode and CJK characters, many people prefer to write Japanese in other encodings.