Asian Character Sets •Character sets are converted using Unicode ( ucs2 ). •The  sjis  character set does not support the conversion of these extension characters. •There are several conversion rules from so-called “SHIFT JIS”  to Unicode, and some characters are converted to Unicode differently depending on the conversion rule. MySQL supports only one of these rules (described later). • cp932  supports NEC special characters, NEC selected—IBM extended characters, and IBM selected characters. •Some  cp932  characters have two different code points, both of which convert to the same Unicode code point. When converting from Unicode back to  cp932 , one of the code points must be selected. For this “round trip conversion,”  the rule recommended by Microsoft is used. (See http://support.microsoft.com/ kb/170559/EN-US/.) •If the character is in both JIS X 0208 and NEC special characters, use the code point of JIS X 0208. •If the character is in both NEC special characters and IBM selected characters, use the code point of NEC special characters. •If the character is in both IBM selected characters and NEC selected—IBM extended characters, use the code point of IBM extended characters. •NEC special characters (lead byte  0x87 ): •NEC selected—IBM extended characters (lead byte  0xED  and  0xEE ): •IBM selected characters (lead byte  0xFA ,  0xFB ,  0xFC ): 1983 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/gg671839 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/gg671840 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/gg671841 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/gg671837 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/gg671838 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/gg674964 The MySQL  cp932  character set is designed to solve these problems. Because MySQL supports character set conversion, it is important to separate IANA  Shift_JIS  and cp932  into two different character sets because they provide different conversion rules. The  cp932  character set differs from  sjis  in the following ways: How does  cp932  differ from  sjis ? The following links are of special interest. They correspond to the encodings for the following sets of characters: The table shown at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/cc305152.aspx provides information about the Unicode values of  cp932  characters. For  cp932  table entries with characters under which a four-digit number appears, the number represents the corresponding Unicode ( ucs2 ) encoding. For table entries with an underlined two-digit value appears, there is a range of  cp932  character values that begin with those two digits. Clicking such a table entry takes you to a page that displays the Unicode value for each of the  cp932  characters that begin with those digits. The conversion rule works like this: