Official Japanese Twitter blog announced [J] today that Twitter is now capable of Japanese character hashtags.
Now when you use # or its Japanese version ＃ followed by Japanese keywords on your tweet, that will be automatically linked on Twitter.
As Japanese is not a language separated by spaces, it is a bit tricky to direct which part is hashtag or not. You need to insert extra spaces before and after the hashtag, or use Japanese punctuations. It is not natural writings but if you forget it, all the sentence to the end of the tweet will become a long hashtag.
Although Twitter is much more popular in Japanese than any other languages, its Japanese support has been generally poor. At the early stage Japanese users need to hack on it to send Japanese tweets. Search and trending topics were introduced very recently, now hashtag comes.
Twitter official tells that you may not use symbols (like star ☆) for hashtag. But in Unicode, it is not easy to define which letters are Japanese and which are not. So it is possible that other non-latin chatacters are involved to this change. I did not know they were available before but hangeul and cyrillic hashtags I tested are also linkified.
It is likely that non-Japanese Twitter clients/services will not be able to support this feature, so this will help Japanese third party developers’ applications targeting Japanese Twitter users.
