Study finds Japanese typography broken on 5 major global brand websites due to font errors

A developer scanned the Japanese-language pages of 146 websites — including 109 global brands — using a custom tool and found widespread typography rendering issues. The core problem stems from a Unicode design decision that assigns identical code points to characters used differently in Japanese and Chinese, leaving visual rendering dependent on whichever font loads first. Five global brands were found to be displaying Japanese text using Chinese glyph shapes for every visitor, due to Chinese fonts like Microsoft YaHei or PingFang SC being declared ahead of any Japanese font in their CSS. Notably, in three of those five cases, the problematic font stack was not in the companies' own stylesheets but embedded inside third-party tools such as cookie-consent banners and live-chat widgets. The audit, conducted on 18 August 2026, highlights how outsourced front-end components can silently undermine localisation efforts without site owners being aware.