You got 3 letters?! Luck!

I worked at a japanese company whose engineers we're former NTT developers. Copypasta (i.e. not using functions), inefficient algos, single-letter var names, remote code execution from code as root, etc. good times!

single-letter var names

in kanji?

Such hits as 'a', 'b', 'x', and 'y'. I know the version of the language we were using didn't have native utf-8 support, so I don't think kanji varnames were possible. It even made comments in kana and kanji really wonky (I think the comments were shiftjis)