UTF-8 support for Japanese

[David Kuehling]

GNU Emacs 21.1 does not have support for encoding japanese characters as
UTF-8. This is very annoying, since texts containing japanese characters
and german umlauts can only be saved as iso-2022-jp-2 and emacs-mule,
which are not supported by most other programs.

Has any work been done on japanese UTF-8 yet? If yes, where can I get
the code?  If not, would anybody mind if I tried to work on that
subject?  Could be done quite simply by using glibc's iconv tables.

                                                          David Kühling