On 2004.11.16, at 02:58 PM, Curt Sampson wrote:

>
> Is there some sort of issue with Hankaku Katakana in our iconv? I
> can work with it ok in UTF-8, but if I try to save it in vim with
> fileencoding=Shift_JIS, I can't. In fact, from a UTF-8 file containing
> half-width katakana:
...

This really doesn't answer your question, but the 8 bit katakana are 
deprecated in the Unicode world. Also, Shift-JIS half-width katakana 
are a real pain in the neck to work with, and are often not supported. 
vim handles Japanese lately in some configurations, but I've never 
tried half-width katakana on it. Have you been able to save those 
characters from vim in the past?