How to stop Japanese characters displaying badly on Windows?

Question

I'm making a site that targets English speakers, but due to the subject nature (general Japanese culture), it's becoming increasingly obvious that there'll be some chunks of Japanese text on at least half of the pages (people sometimes randomly add the "シ" and "ツ" Katakana to their English comments, for starters). Today was the first time I really took a good look at this text on a Windows machine, though, and it looks terrible and blocky.

These are the two options that my research has yielded;

1. Include a Japanese webfont in every page (this slows the page down even on pages that don't include Japanese and don't need to use the font).
2. Change the language header to Japanese (this would be SEO suicide as the only people the site is useful to is English speakers).

Are there any other options, or do I just have to grimace and accept this 1998-esque font for my Windows users?

Answer 1

You can combine the common Japanese characters you want (in a font of your choosing) with a different font using a webfont geneator, eg fontie that lets you remove unwanted goups of characters or font squirrel as long as you have legal rights to use/embed them.

If you create a font with very limited Japanese characters and use this first ou can set your main font as the first fallback font.

More on Japanese webfonts from stackoverflow.com