IPA Overview
Some characters in family or location names cannot be displayed in regular operating system (OS) environment as they are not represented in existing Japanese encoding systems and are not consistent from one computer or OS to another. In order to avoid such instances, IPA has been undertaking international standardization of 60,000 characters and fonts.
The international standard for code-points was set in December 2017 for their universal display in a general computer environment. This eliminated custom-coding needs for private-use characters, which will improve efficiency in data processing as well as in data sharing between governments and agencies.