The problem with that is that the ASCII code for a backslash is also used as the second byte in a 2 byte character in Shift-JIS, which can sometimes cause Japanese string literals to not work properly in C. EUC-JP is better for this purpose, because it does not have that problem. (Using Shift-JIS with Pascal also does not have this problem, if you are using the (* *) comments instead of the { } comments.)