The IBM Kanji System was announced in 1971 to support Japanese language processing on the IBM System/360 computers. It was later enhanced by the support of IBM System/34, IBM 5550 and DOS/V.

General

The IBM Kanji System became available in a series of staged announcements. Its initial technical demonstration was done at Expo '70 in Osaka, and an official announcement was made in 1971, including: The Kanji Keypunch was able to punch up to 2950 kinds of Kanji characters, using the left hand to select one of the 15 shift keys and the right hand to select one of the 240 Kanji characters for each shift. Until that time, only English alphanumeric and Japanese half-width Katakana characters were processed on IBM mainframes. The IBM Kanji System thus established the basis for handling up to about 10,000 Japanese characters used in the daily life. The IBM Kanji System was further enhanced in September 1979 to include: Hardware Kanji support software The IBM Kanji System was planned, designed, and implemented mainly by Double-byte Technical Coordination Organization (DTCO) and development departments in IBM Fujisawa Laboratory, assisted by IBM Endicott Lab (IBM 029), Poughkeepsie Lab (OS/VS), Kingston Lab (IBM 3270), Santa Teresa Lab (IMS), Hursley Lab (CICS), Boeblingen Lab (DOS/VSE) and other locations as well as related vendors. These announcements were followed by other announcements:

Competition and cooperation

At the time of its development, Japan's major mainframe companies were developing their own Japanese processing systems independently and at the same time cooperating to establish a Japanese character code industry standard (JIS X 0208). Some of these systems are:

Effect to the support of other languages

Similar supports later became available for Korean, and Chinese (both in Traditional and Simplified forms).