Thanks for the answers.
I do have a case where I will need to read from a file containing Japanese strings (with separators like comma etc.). I would need to read these contents and create data entities in memory.
This is the only case where I foresee parsing.
Hence, do you still recommend using the wide char family on both Windows and Unix ?

Do you need to have special considerations in choosing between UNICODE and MBCS considering that this application (currently targetting the 32-bit platform) will soon need to be ported to the 64 bit platform on both Windows and Unix.