If the Japanese characters didn’t show up in yesterday’s entry, it’s probably because you don’t have the Japanese language fonts installed on your computer.  I didn’t, as they’re not installed by default and until recently I had no real reason to install them.  Here’s the procedure I followed to install the fonts on my Windows XP system.

1. Select Regional and Language Options from the Control Panel.
2. On the Languages tab, check the box labeled “Install files for East Asian languages” (This will require about 230 megabytes of disk space.)
   
3. Click OK.  Windows will prompt you for your install CD, and then copy the required files to your hard drive.
4. When prompted, reboot your computer.