Japanese characters?

[meine]

hi,

by accident I discovered that I can compose Japanese kana (hiragana,
katakana) in mutt. I wonder if this is a feature, or somewhere lurking
in my mutt and FreeBSD setup (although I only use default software and
settings). I have NL language settings for UTF-8 on a user level in my
system, and use Vim as the editor for my emails. BTW, this described
here doesn't work in Vim, but only in mutt.

It works like this:

typing a letter, then backspace and then another letter -- just making a
typo and correcting it.

m <backspace> e --> め (hiragana `me`)

M <backspace> e -- メ (katakana `me`)

it just works with all characters, only the plain `a` in both writings I
cannot find.

this way of composing also gives acces to Cyrillic `ja` я, ju `ю` and
`cs` щ, and also to e.g. Arabic numbers ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ and ۹ by
combining a number and `a` as described above.

this way of composing is different from typing characters that are
behind the <AltG> or right-alt key, which I use for typing several
European languages (å ä é ø æ ü, etc).

somehow it is funny to be able to write my name in Japanese, but it can
also be a PITA when making too much typo's. so my question is:

* is this a feature of mutt?

* can it be switched on/off somehow?

TIA,

//meine