Japanese Character & String conversions in terminal

Unicode blocks for Japanese characters

• 3000-303F is CJK Symbols and Punctuation.
• 3040-309F is Hiragana.
• 30A0-30FF is Katakana.
• 4E00-9FFF is CJK Unified Ideographs.
• FF00-FFEF is Half-width and Full-width Forms.

To convert between hiragana and katakana, shift code points by 0x60:

$ echo ひらがな|tr  $'[\u3040-\u309f]' $'[\u30a0-\u30ff]'
ヒラガナ
$ echo カタカナ|tr  $'[\u30a0-\u30ff]' $'[\u3040-\u309f]'
かたかな

To convert between full width and half width, use hyphen and tilde:

$ echo example|tr ' -~' $'\u3000\uff01-\uff5e'
ｅｘａｍｐｌｅ
$ echo ｅｘａｍｐｌｅ|tr $'\u3000\uff01-\uff5e' ' -~'
example

morpho!