Default value for CHARSET when creating a table
You can remove Default, it is not mandatory. If you look att the grammar it says:
| [DEFAULT] CHARACTER Set =

Meaning that the table gets this CHARACTER SET. It does not affect other tables.
If no CHARACTER Set is declared it is &quot;inherited&quot; from the database definition. This is the same as:
CHARACTER Set = DEFAULT

I dont know if it is part of the confusion, but there are two different DEFAULT keywords here, with different meaning. The first says what the default CHARACTER Set for this table is, the second one that the default character set for the database should be used.