How to recover a file which cannot be opened due to using Japanese characters in the file path

What you want can be accomplished with Automator which comes with OS X.

1. Open Automator from the Applications folder

2. Choose New from the File menu or type ⌘-N and choose 'Application'

3. Search Actions for Launch and drag Launch Application to the workflow on the right

4. set the app to Word or whatever else you're having the problem with

5. search Actions for 'Pause' and drag pause to the workflow, set it to however long it takes word to open for you (e.g. 5 seconds)

6. search Actions for Open Finder Items and add that to the workflow.

7. Save it as an Application, drag it to your dock and drag docs on to the icon for it when you want them to open on top of the previous Word docs.

N.B. you can also set all documents to open using your freshly created app, so you can just open them as usual, but then a delay will permanently be added to their opening.

I have often been able to delete otherwise not deletable files by deleting the file in Terminal:

sudo rm /path/to/the/file/to/delete

Without sudo it still fails for me but ad it and files vanish like magic. If you don't know the specific unix file path just type "sudo rm " and then drag the file into the open Terminal window and it will insert the file.

Press ENTER, authenticate with your admin password and the file SHOULD vanish.