Japanese filenames¶

Japanese (and other non-ASCII) characters in filenames are indeed treated differently on Apple’s native file systems (like APFS and older HFS+) compared to exFAT.

Apple's APFS stores filenames in Unicode NFD (Normalization Form Decomposed). - For example, the Japanese character ガ ("ga") can be stored as カ + ゛ (katakana "ka" + combining dakuten mark) instead of the single precomposed code point. exFAT stores filenames in UTF-16 exactly as given (precomposed stays precomposed, decomposed stays decomposed)

So, On exFAT, it’s theoretically possible to have two files that look the same (“visually identical”) in Finder but have different Unicode code-points.

Running rsync between Mac and exFAT drives, might not match unless normalized

Find appropriate solutions when you transfer across different file systems