To understand the nature of the Japanese objection:
Why does there need to be separate and complete Greek and Cryllic alphabets,
when all you need to do is just add the glyphs which aren't in the Roman
alphabet? I could 13 uppercase Greek glyphs which are already in the Roman
alphabet, so you only need to add 11 uppercase glyphs for Greek. Let's not
forget that lowercase beta is also German ess-tset, so that's another glyph we
can unify.
Why does there need to be the uppercase letter `O' as a separate glyph from
the number `0'?
Why does there need to be the lowercase letter `l' as a separate glyph from
the number `1'?
I consider such suggestions absurd, of course; but the notion of unifying East
Asian character sets is equally absurd.
It is *extremely* Euro-centric to take the attitude that European languages
need to have a representation of their national character sets in an order
that makes sense in that language, but the same thing does not need to be done
for East Asian languages.
There are national differences in the glyphs. For example, Japanese and
Chinese write the glyph with the meaning ``right'' (as opposite from left)
with a different stroke order in the first two strokes, resulting in a
character with noticable differences, particularly in cursive writing. Is
there a separate glyph for ``Japanese'' vs ``Chinese'' versions, or is one
arbitrarily picked over the other?
There are at least five major character sets which use glyphs of Chinese
origin: Japanese, Korean, and three Chinese sets -- GB, BIG5, CCCII. In all
likelihood, one character set's ordering is used and the others are somehow
shoehorned in. What character set is that? As an educated guess, I'm willing
to bet that it corresponds to the ordering in Red China's national character
set GB, in keeping with the tendency of international organizations to kowtow
to the Peking regime.
I understand that the Republic of China on Taiwan also objects to Unicode's
Chinese character unification, so it isn't just Japan.