- In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters (幽霊文字).
Twitter is fully correct in arguing that these would make an awesomely obscure tattoo. 穃 粫 挧 橸 膤 袮 閠 妛 暃 椦 軅 鵈 恷 碵 駲 墸 壥 彁 蟐 Twitter is also correct in noting that Google Translate recognizes them as Japanese, then translates them to Chinese while claiming they're English. It will, however pronounce the Chinese while failing out on the Japanese.
If you aren't into tattoos you could always adopt a ghost.
Fascinating. Some of them seems to be place names invented by accident, but I wonder if they all have some meaning or whether the meaning is lost too? Presumably these aren't people involved in the process of creating the encoding so who are these people I wonder? Unicode consortium ? Japanese firms creating fonts? General public seems unlikely. Wikipedia says there are only 6879 characters which seems lower than I'd imagine However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange