Foreign characters show as question marks

probably because you don’t have the japanese language pack installed on your machine, so the default font that you are using doesn’t have characters equivelant to the japanese.

I would like a solution to this for my WordPress blog, thanks.

Install the Japanese character set onto your PC. Thats the solution. ??

Another option that is pretty bad, but will work… If osmeone wants to post in a language that requires a different character set, make then add that text as an image file. That will be displayed anywhere, but it is really a bad way of doing it.

The only other option is to stop people from posting in anyting that’s not English. That way you will see the right characters all the time.

Unfortuantely, there’s nothing that WordPress can do that can force Japanese characters to be displayed on PC’s that don’t have them installed. That’s up to the user that views your site and cannot be controlled by you.

Japanese displays just fine for other sites I visit and on my forum.

Ok, sorry. If you had have said that before, I would have offered this different advice.

Change the charset that your blog uses. This is set as UTF-8 by default, which is standard for “western” languages but mainly english. You will need to change this to whatever charset supports the Japanese character set that you want to use. You can set this in your admin under ‘Settings’ => ‘Reading’. Look at the instructions there and you will be able to find what you need.

One word of warning though. Changing the charset with existing posts there could cause corruptions in other characters. There’s no certainty about it, but it would be best to go back over everything that’s there now and double-check it to make sure that it’s stil dipslaying as it’s supposed to after the change is mae.