Japanese Kana Symbols in Fonts

[Oliver Corff]

Dear All,

thank you for your kind support in 2020! Please accept my best wishes
for 2021!

Though I do understand that groff and friends do not officially support
CJK languages, I came across a Japanese adaptation which was deeply
buried in a debian archive. Unfortunately the binaries do not run on my
local Fedora box, so I have no chance to understand the scope of
Japanese support offered by the patched version.

I noticed, however, that both the html and utf8 device of the current
groff installations seems to contain character descriptions in \[u....]
notation which happen to cover the Japanese kana syllabary.
(/usr/share/groff/1.22.3/font/devutf8/R is such an example; please bear
with me that I did not yet upgrade to the most recent groff version).

How do I associate the R font description with a real font containing
kana characters so that I can produce a PDF target? I had a look at man
groff_font but I failed to extract the necessary information.

Am I totally mistaken and off the track?

Thank you very much for any answer that guides me into the right direction,

Oliver.