"Shift-JIS" is not a keystroke on a keyboard. It's a encoding for the Japanese character sets, which uses sequences of 1 (for ASCII characters), 2 (for Hiragana, Katakana, extended Latin, and basic Kanji), or 4 (for extended Kanjis) bytes to encode each character.

The full name of the standard is a number like JISX-0208. On Windows, the Japanese ANSI codepage is based on an extension of the JISX standard, but is commonly refered to as "Shift-JIS" or "SJIS". The full Japanese standard is based on ISO2022, in a Japanese profile, that selects several encoding mechanisms.

In a browser, you generally have a menu option that allows you to change the way the HTML pages should be decoded, in the case where the content of the page is not readable with the autoselected character set, or when the page contains a reference to a character set encoding that is not the one used in the actual content.

This is the case of this thread: the HTML page specifies the ISO-8859-1 encoding, but Japanese users have posted here their message by setting their borwser so that they will send SJIS-encoded characters. So they don't display well, and this have to be changed manually.

Unfortunately, this forum does not encode the main page with a Unicode encoding like UTF-8, and the forum has currently no support for transcoding all incoming messages into Unicode UTF-8.
It would be easier for everyone if the whole forum site was UTF-8, because everybody could use the forum and compose with its native character sets.

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