In 1978, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the JIS X 0208 encoding. However, a strange phenomenon emerged: several characters appeared with no obvious source or meaning. Known as ghost characters (幽霊文字), these mysterious glyphs remained an unexplained curiosity for decades until a 1997 investigation was launched.

Investigators discovered that many characters were inadvertently invented due to mistakes during the cataloging process. For instance, the character 妛 was an error introduced while trying to record a specific place name. While most origins were eventually traced back to massive multi-volume sets like the Overview of National Administrative Districts, one character, 彁, remains a complete enigma with no historical precedent.

Following the adoption of JIS standards, these errors made their way into Unicode. These mistakes were set in stone long enough to become part of every computer on the planet, lurking in the dark corners of character tables forever.