Whilst investigating an internationalisation issue in some Java code whereby on a Japanese Windows 7 OS, the Japanese titles of media files (images/videos) appear as Chinese characters in excel files exported from a manager application (that records events such as item A started “playing”, stopped “playing”, item B started and so on), I came across a problem with displaying Japanese characters in an applet. These displayed correctly outside of the application (e.g. on my desktop). Even in the application but outside the applet I could type Japanese and it would be displayed correctly (e.g. when logging in to the application). In the applet, on the other hand, the Japanese characters were appearing as open boxes. This type of issue has been written about extensively, and I tried some of the fixes, but without success. My first, unsuccessful, attempt was to place a Japanese true type font into the jre/lib/fonts/fallback folder.
At this stage, I tested my application anyway (by exporting the excel files mentioned above) and found that the Japanese titles were correctly stored in the excel files mentioned above. However, I then tried another suggested fix for the incorrectly displaying Japanese characters in the applet. This was to set the Formats property under Region and Language (Control Panel) to Japanese. Unfortunately, the applet display problem remained as before, but in addition now the Japanese titles of the media files are appearing garbled in the excel files. An example:
②ソニー��　自動車�険　クルマ�人�「時代�変���も�篇　�30秒】.jpg
when it should be:
②ソニー損保 自動車保険 クルマと人と「時代が変わっても」篇 【30秒】.jpg
I now wish to get back to the original situation. I have set the Formats back to English (United Kingdom). I have also restarted Tomcat, MySql, rebooted my machine and recompiled all my Java code. However, I am unable to get back to the happy situation of the ungarbled Japanese titles in the excel files.
I am now quite certain that this was solved by reverting Formats back to English, recompiling the code and restarting Tomcat. I must have missed an area of code in the recompile.