As a byproduct of some work our team is doing, we needed to test and handle different character sets for Asian languages (Katakana, Hiragana, etc). A guy on the team came up with a pretty sweet proof of concept test application so we can trial combinations and see how things work based on ignoring widths, etc. even some database interaction. We figured this would be useful to others in the .NET community so we are giving back
Check out http://jpcharsets.codeplex.com/ for more info, but basically you can play around with the different character sets to your hearts content and look at the source code behind the comparisons of different sets. Enjoy!
Steve Novoselac's Blog 