So, as an exercise of my own fair use policy, I’ve purchased import CDs from Japan and ripped them to my hard drive at work. This is done so that I can listen to the music that I’ve bought without having to shuttle the CDs back and forth. However, these are Japanese CDs, and when the information about the CD came up, only black squares appeared where there should have been kanji, katakana, hiragana, etc. You’ve seen them before in corrupt word documents and whatnot.
Naturally, I figured that the characters couldn’t be displayed because I didn’t have East Asian Language support installed on my machine.
So I installed East Asian Language support for the machine at work. Twenty minutes later, I rebooted, and lo and behold–
The song titles appeared in western characters.
I spent twenty minutes to install western characters. Ah well. Can’t be helped.
The artist featured above is Ayumi Hamasaki, one of the most successful Japanese pop stars I think, ever.