Here's a short demonstration of what the unary plus will do to a Character variable:

private static void method(int i){
    System.out.println("int: " + i);
}

private static void method(char c){
    System.out.println("char: " + c);
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
    Character ch = 'X';
    method(ch);
    method(+ch);        
}

The output of running this programme is:

char: X
int: 88

How it works: Unary + or - unbox their operand, if it's a wrapper object, then promote their operand to int, if not already an int or wider. So, as we can see, while the first call to method will choose the char overload (unboxing only), the second call will choose the int version of method. Variable ch of type Character will be passed into method as int argument because of the applied unary plus.