Why can't my Chromium display Japanese characters?

There is a known problem - Issue 7160: Wrong font for Japanese characters in English language Chrome, dating from January 2008 but unfixed until today.

Only workarounds contributed by users are available, none of which is perfect and some contradict each other. It seems that the only real solution at the moment is to keep on using Firefox.

Workaround 1 : Issue 7160: Wrong font for Japanese characters in English language Chrome

In the font and language settings, set Serif Font to MS PMincho; Sans-Serif Font to Meiryo; Fixed-Width Font to MS Gothic.

This yields the correct glyphs for all Japanese sites. English looks as usual in Sans-Serif (most of the Web), but a bit harder to read in Fixed-Width and Serif.

Workaround 2 : Chromium and font

Since I'm in Japan (but I would rather use English), google defaults to the japanese site. On this, all the text becomes squares. However, I installed Droid font from AUR. It comes with Japanese font, and that fixed it. Now when I go to google, I can actually read the Japanese webpage

Workaround 3 : How to display Japanese characters in Google Chrome/Chromium?

remove google-droid fonts:

yum remove google-droid*

For Japanese characters:

sudo apt-get install ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-sazanami-gothic

For Chinese characters:

sudo apt-get install ttf-arphic-uming ttf-arphic-zenhei

or

sudo apt-get install ttf-arphic-uming ttf-arphic-ukai

For Korean characters:

sudo apt-get install ttf-unfonts-core