HP 3000 Manuals

Micro Focus COBOL Language Reference - Additional Topics

Source Programs 

DBCS characters can be used in literals, in comments and comment-entries,
and in user-defined words.  Otherwise the NCHAR or JAPANESE directives do
not change the range of characters that can be used in source programs -
the program is still written using the COBOL character set (see the
chapter Concepts of the COBOL Language in your Language Reference).

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation