>>6 Ahh okay, wasn't aware of that one. Mind you, Japanese has 3 different character sets, a standard one (can't recall its name), Kanji (borrowed from Chinese sets AFAIK), and Katakana (used for "borrowed" words from foreign languages).

The standard one is the only one I've seen in any sort of detail.
The example you give there would almost certainly cause problems for the OCR scanner.

Basically, what this means is, there's more to it than just optical scanning -- one actually has to look at the words themselves to see which character is the more likely candidate.