Java stores all strings in UTF-16. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time but has led to problems later. There is now a huge body of broken code out there which assumes that each 16-bit char value represents a complete and separate Unicode character.
Um. Wasn't Java's original choice UCS-2 (same as NTFS originally)? UTF-16 has surrogate characters and the length will be one or two 16-bit values depending on whether it's a surrogate. UCS-2 was a fixed 16-bit character size, long since deemed a mistake.
