I have run into an interesting situation. I had noticed that the Merge Contacts v2 script does not check the furigana fields in contacts for merger, meaning data could be lost for Japanese contacts. I therefore made a copy of the script, opened it, and duplicated the code used to check first names to check the field first name furigana. When I try to check the syntax, my system hard crashes. I have Entourage with AppleScript 1.6.
Entourage is registered as a Japanese application, in case that makes any difference.