Developing Web pages that support a variety of different languages and character sets can give webmasters that competitive edge in a globalized economy. For an HTML page to support Japanese characters -- as well as characters from other languages -- you'll need an encoding and character set with international support. UTF-8 is an internationally-used standard character set that's based on Unicode encoding and supports all the major languages.
Step 1
Create or edit your document in a text or HTML editor that allows you to select the enoding system. This includes Microsoft Notepad, Adobe Dreamweaver and most widely-used Web design software.
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Step 2
Within the <head> tag of the document, declare the character set using the "Content-Type" meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Step 3
Save your document with the proper encoding. In Microsoft Notepad, select "Save As" and change "Encoding" to either Unicode or UTF-8. Adobe Dreamweaver saves documents in Unicode by default, but yo can change those settings in the "New Document" section of the preferences menu.
Step 4
Insert Japanese text into the body of your document.
Step 5
Open the page in a Web browser and verify that the characters display correctly. If not, double-check the encoding settings.