He tried to start a war on two fronts

Either you meant "her" or I missed out something of a shocking revelation on my last read-through

TNG was pretty much entirely model based (not CGI) - Star Trek didn't really CGI up until mid-way through Deep Space Nine, ironically using the guys who did the CGI for the first few years of Babylon 5 (and Babylon 5 used CGI purely because their budget was so tiny, you really have to give them credit for puching way above their weight the way they did)

Mod parent up - the fact Iran isn't an Arab country is a significant part of why the Arab states all hate the place (they even tried to wipe out the Iranians a few hundred years ago, did about a good a job as the Nazis did to the Jews, and the Iranians certainly haven't forgotten)

All phones on a particular network, on a particular radio technology - important detail there (Yes, Softbank aped the FOMA connector for their 3G phones, but the two networks' 2G phone connectors are entirely different, then you have AU etc etc)

A quick google gives 227 million results for (hiragana) 6 million for (katakana) and 34 million for (kanji) though there's an element of linking there (where the kanji search gives pages that only have kana) so the results are totally unscientific. I also didn't say that people in Yokohama are illiterate - just that if you honestly think that most Japanese people can actually write all the jouyou kanji from memory you are sadly mistaken - why do you think that "wapuro-baka" was coined. I'm sure that at some point they knew how to write them all, but they've forgotten over time. I for one have forgotten plenty of things that I studied far more recently than when I was 16, and I don't think of myself as an idiot - there's only so many things that one can remember.

I'm not saying that the Japanese are illiterate - I'm just saying that the "99% literacy" rate is a myth - it should be obvious from how much more complex the written Japanese language is than English / French / etc. There are plenty of sources that say that "Japan has an amazing 99% literacy rate" without mentioning that the 99% figure is an assumed rate from a UN study which grants the same 99% rate to all the other developed first-world countries. There's also the issue of "literacy" vs "practical literacy" - the UK has been concentrating on the latter for a while even though it has a seemingly high literacy rate

There are less French layouts that I know of than English layouts (even than just of US layouts) - the French have been historically much more sucessful at linguistic domination/control of the language than the English have

I think that his sales figures are far too high - and perhaps are driven by the ludicrous cost. All you need to do is look at the Kodansha thing last week to see that a lot of stuff isn't on sale digitally, and won't be, because they're offering stupidly low rates. I don't know about novels, but original keitai comics are entirely done by amateurs - if there's one thing that Japan is not lacking in, it's wannabe mangaka - because the small ventures that are publishing them are basically expecting free work (rates of 1 to 10 yen per page) - if you're counting that, then the web-comic industry is part of the western publishing industry too (I expect it's not currently counted as being such.) The stuff that's available on phones is from a tiny pool of stories - Softbank have something like 200 different comic publishers on their comics menu, but they are all selling from the same pool of 100 or so titles from only one or two publishers, and they all want 1.5x to 2x the price that buying a tankobon would cost, even for comics that are pushing 30 years old.

I said know not "can read" - and please try not to come across as some sort of smug "I actually USE Japanese, I'm not some neckbeard type" because I do too. I don't read Japanese newspapers because the quality of the reporting is some of the worst in the world, but I've forgotten more about the Japanese comic book industry - from an insider pov, not reader pov - than you have ever known. In fact, in terms of comic books, look at teen comic books published in the 80s, and recently, and you'll see that a lot of them now use rubi for all kanji terms, when that was really a young-kids thing 15 or 20 years ago, there's a literacy based reason for that... Kani I've never seen on labels - including in supermarkets, we shall have to agree to disagree (is this a Yokohama vs Shizuoka thing?)

Well, the French keyboard is probably used in more different countries than the US keyboard then - does that satisfy you?

Quotes of "full literacy" for Japanese/Chinese are pure unadulterated bullshit - if you're willing to drop your standards so hard that China and Japan hit 90% literacy then you may as well claim that the UK, US, Australia, and other English-speaking nations have 100% - or better than 100% - literacy. I can tell you right now that none of the people I work with - highly trained engineers - are actually literate to the levels that the Japanese government expects of 16 year olds.

You forget to add that languages change their sort order / consideration of ligatures being letters from time to time. German and Swiss German have both - iirc - promoted/demoted letters and changed sorting within the past 10 or 15 years

Considered by the unicode consortium - who seemed to spend more time discussing whether or not to add a Klingon language plane than discussing Chinese-Korean-Japanese. They're as connected as Roman-Cyrillic-Russian characters are, and the ignorance of the unicode consortium has led to millions of localisation bugs, and a far reduced use of unicode in China, Japan, and Korea than in the west. Oh and there are a bunch of characters that are only one-way mappable JIS/SJIS/EUC to Unicode due to botched mapping tables (at the very least for perl and java's unicode)

If you mean the "English" keyboard, you have the US keyboard, UK keyboard, Irish keyboard, US (Apple) keyboard, UK (Apple) keyboard, Microsoft Extended UK keyboard, Microsoft Extended US keyboard etc etc etc...