Several mutually incompatible versions of the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) have been used to represent the Japanese language on computers, including variants defined by Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM and others. Some are variable-width encodings, employing locking shift codes to switch between single-byte and double-byte modes.[1] Unlike other EBCDIC locales, the lowercase basic Latin letters are often not preserved in their usual locations.[2]
The characters which are found in the double-byte Japanese code used with EBCDIC by IBM, but not found in the first edition of JIS X 0208, also influenced the vendor extensions found in some non-EBCDIC encodings such as IBM code page 932 ("DBCS-PC") and Windows code page 932.[3]