There's a lot to consider when dealing with multibyte characters in your programs - see this JavaWorld article:

"Most J2EE servers can support multibyte-character languages (like Chinese and Japanese) very well, but different J2EE servers and browsers support them differently. When developers port some Chinese (or Japanese) localized applications from one server to another, they will always face multibyte-character problems. In this article, Wang Yu analyzes the root causes of problems related to multibyte characters and provides some solutions and guidelines."