That doesn't jive with what I know of Matz. Japan (and much of Asia) adopted Unicode much slower because both UTF-8 and UTF-16 are less efficient than many of the native encodings for representing much of what they need; there was definitely some cultural tone-deafness in the Unicode community when it did Han unification (which may be a good idea, but could have been handled better).
Matz (and the people he works with who use Ruby to get their jobs done) needs access to data that's Not Unicode. Painfully Not Unicode as in it doesn't necessarily round-trip.
Matz (and the people he works with who use Ruby to get their jobs done) needs access to data that's Not Unicode. Painfully Not Unicode as in it doesn't necessarily round-trip.