[R] Converting two byte encoding to UTF-8

[Duncan Murdoch]

I have a file that includes Japanese characters encoded using the 
"JIS_X0208-1997" encoding.  According to iconvlist(), an earlier 
revision "JIS_X0208-1990" is supported, so I'd like to try that to 
decode them.

However, I can't seem to find how to provide input to iconv() to do it. 
This is a two-byte encoding, so one character has bytes

 > as.raw(result[[1]]$kanji)
[1] b0 a1

But this is being interpreted as two characters by iconv():

 > iconv(as.raw(result[[1]]$kanji), from = "JIS_X0208-1990", to = "UTF-8")
[1] "皸" "甕"

I can't seem to find any input that iconv() will accept to treat this as 
a single character.  (I believe the answer should be 亜 , if that helps.) 
  How do I tell it to use 0xb0a1 (or 0xa1b0, if that's the right byte 
order)?  I just see NA:

 >  iconv(0xb0a1, from = "JIS_X0208-1990", to = "UTF-8")
[1] NA
 > iconv(0xa1b0, from = "JIS_X0208-1990", to = "UTF-8")
[1] NA

Duncan Murdoch