Surely everyone can type Kanji now though? I could see that being an issue adopting to typewriters from handwriting, but now I assume those issues have been fixed. There's not many symbols you can't represent in Unicode and people aren't making up new symbols commonly.
Like, these faxes are still typed and printed first, right? People aren't just handwriting everything. About the only advantage of faxes in such a situation is the ability to personally sign/stamp something easier.
I used to work for a company doing Japanese handwriting recognition, and we would sometimes get request "can you support kanjis not in unicode" and "lost" contracts because we could not. This is especially the case for rare Kanji for family names, etc. I still have no idea how those customers actually handle those kanjis in their systems, must be fun.
Ummm.... China/Japan was making up new symbols constantly. Which is why UTF-16 failed. We Westerners have small alphabets and less of the image/iconography culture than the Eastern world.
I can absolutely see this "iconography" culture in China/Japan being a major reason for fax machines.
To be pedantic, what failed was UCS-2, the enconding formerly known as just 'Unicode'. UTF-16 was introduced with version 2.0 of the standard and can encode all codepoints thanks to the surrogate pair mechanism.
I'd expect print to standardize on a subset originating in the days of physical type and manual setting, when every character removed from the printing set would ameliorate very real costs at just about every stage of production.
Like, these faxes are still typed and printed first, right? People aren't just handwriting everything. About the only advantage of faxes in such a situation is the ability to personally sign/stamp something easier.