Japanese.7z May 2026

Version 19 and later have improved handling of Japanese half-width kana, reducing the occurrence of garbled text.

A file containing Japanese characters often results in garbled file names (mojibake) when extracted on a system not set to Japanese locale. This happens because the archive likely uses an old non-Unicode character encoding (like Shift-JIS/Code Page 932) to store filenames.

Modern 7-Zip fully supports Unicode, but if the archive was created with an old tool using SJIS, it needs special handling.

If you need to extract many such files, temporarily change your Windows system locale to Japanese. Go to > Clock and Region > Region . Click the Administrative tab. Click Change system locale... and select Japanese (Japan) .