Some Japanese characters cannot be displayed in the Japanese locale with JRE 1.3.1_02 using JIS0208 character encoding.  The glyphs for the characters that fail to display are available on the Japanese Solaris as the characters are easily displayed on a dtterm window.  It seems that the JRE is missing a mapping of these characters to the correct font/glyph.

A patched version of CharToByteJIS0208.java has been created which fixes the problem.  The problem also does not exist on 1.4.x.  

To reproduce the problem, you need the Japanese language support (EUC encoding). Next, you need to make sure that the terminal you use is set up such that the locale command will display the following:

% locale
LANG=ja
LC_CTYPE="ja"
LC_NUMERIC="ja"
LC_TIME="ja"
LC_COLLATE="ja"
LC_MONETARY="ja"
LC_MESSAGES="ja"
LC_ALL=

Next, cat the attached file "characters".  On your terminal, you should see something like "Microsoft Word - VIII".  Please select the Roman numerals V and III by using the Sun copy key.   

Next, do the following:  

%cd /usr/demo/J2SE/demo/jfc/Stylepad
% java -jar Stylepad.jar &

Once the application comes up, use the Sun paste key to paste what you just copied from the characters file.  The characters will be displayed as square boxes.  

If you replace CharToBytesJIS0208.java with the attached modified version, the characters are displayed properly.  The diffs between the original and modified files are also attached.

The attached fonts.dir file shows the fonts used in the application.  The font has support for additional Unicode glyphs than those in CharToByteJIS0208.java.  The modifications to the file simply add the additional mappings that the font (HG-MonchoL.ttf-ricoh-hg mincho l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-jisx0208.1983-0) is capable of handling.