Sending email (smtp) with embedded uicode char

Wanted to share a small script to email a foreign language text (in my case Japanese) that can only be encoded in unicode.
Precondition: need to have an SMTP notification set up as described here:

Mine is called notify.SMStoAll - I am using a gmail email account to mobile carrier configuration:

  - name: SMStoAll
    platform: smtp
    server: smtp.gmail.com
    port: 587
    timeout: 15
    sender: !secret gmail_username
    encryption: starttls
    username: !secret gmail_username
    password: !secret google_smtp_password
    recipient:
      - !secret A_sms
      - !secret B_sms
      - !secret C_sms
    sender_name: My Home Assistant

Now comes the tricky part: you can use a regular call to the notifier with regular message body BUT you must force gmail and/or the carrier to interpret the message in rich text / html.
This is easily achieved by adding an empty html body to the message as shown below.

service: notify.SMStoAll
data_template:
  title: Home Assistant Message
  message: '{{ message_en }} - {{ message_jp }}'
  data:
    html: ' '

Tada! The message arrived readable in Japanese script