JIS X 0201 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - ", developed in 1969, was the first Japanese character encoding to become widely used. It is an 8-bit encoding, which yields 256 potential characters. The lower 128 characters comprise a Japanese variant of ASCII, with backslash (\) and tilde (~) replaced by yen (¥) and overline (¯), while the upper 128 characters consist mainly of katakana."