Japanese characters show up as ??? after migration

Found UTF-8 Database Converter, but it does not seem to have been updated nor support WordPress 3.0.4

I read here: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/special-characters-converted-to-question-marks-on-save?replies=39
that

If the symbols in the database are ????? then it could be that the database isn’t correctly set to utf8 or it could be that the multibyte string stuff for php isn’t working.

The database and collation for the database are UTF8, but the Japanese in wp_posts is displayed as ??? so something went wrong for sure..

My Wp_POsts Table SQl is:

#
# Table structure of table wp_posts
#

CREATE TABLE wp_posts (
ID bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
post_author bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL default ‘0’,
post_date datetime NOT NULL default ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’,
post_date_gmt datetime NOT NULL default ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’,
—————
guid varchar(255) NOT NULL default ”,
menu_order int(11) NOT NULL default ‘0’,
post_type varchar(20) NOT NULL default ‘post’,
post_mime_type varchar(100) NOT NULL default ”,
comment_count bigint(20) NOT NULL default ‘0’,
PRIMARY KEY (ID),
KEY post_name (post_name),
KEY type_status_date (post_type,post_status(1),post_date,ID),
KEY post_parent (post_parent)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=2261 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 ;

Adjusted all latin1 in the database dump making them utf8 and reimported all in an empty utf8 database. Now I can read the Japanese characters in PMa, but the display in the front end still shows “????”. Wonder why? Encoding for pages and feeds is utf8 according to WP settings as well..

Odd things is that the Japanese in the backend under posts is shown as ?? as well. Despite the fact that the database and tables are uft8 now as well as the page character encoding. Odd..

Well, I imported the unaltered database dump as latin one (character set of file latin1) into the utf8 database and now all is displayed well. Column collation is latin1_swedish_ci. But why can’t I just have it all as utf8?