Mojibake - Japanese character garble

If your browser isn't set up to display Japanese characters, then whether you can read them or not, they won't even be visible. Here's what my WebTV Viewer makes of Amazon's front page.

WebTV view

(Don't blame WebTV! This just happens to be the only browser I have handy without Japanese support.)

Anyway, at the top of the page you can probably see that the blue navigation bar is in real Japanese, because it's just an image, and doesn't change depending on your browser. But most of the page is text, and gets garbled into a horrible mix of funny letters, symbols, and so on, because the WebTV viewer doesn't know about Japanese character encodings or fonts. If you get a result like this, it means your browser doesn't support Japanese.

The Japanese term for this is mojibake, where moji means "characters", and bake means "garbled" (pronounced like "back end" with the 'nd' chopped off).

(Normally, close this window to go back to the "Buying from Amazon.co.jp" page and read about the cure for mojibake.) ----

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