I installed the Japanese language pack for Windows 8 but I'm finding Japanese folder names and siilar don't have the actual characters displaying, either it has square blocks or garbage like '—ö‚ÍI‚í‚ç‚È‚¢‚¸‚Á‚Æ'
Any ideas how to fix?
Windows – Japanese characters in windows 8 appear as blocks
charactersjapanesewindows 8
Related Solutions
The problem can be in the applications you are using, choosing the wrong font because your locale is English, or it can be with Windows caching the wrong font.
A very old solution, which might still work, is to create a file named
火.txt (or similar if this is not Japanese, as I don't know either one)
and save it to your desktop and then reboot.
The logic here is that when Windows boots it will cache the right font.
Another old method is to change the system locale to Japanese and then back to English, without reboot, which probably works by invalidating the fonts cache.
A more modern solution is to trick applications into thinking that they were launched in Japanese locale. A utility which simplifies this is the free Locale Emulator.
This seems to be related to the custom dictionary file (imjp15cu) as it gives an error whenever "edit" under custom dictionary is clicked in the advanced settings.
From a non-1803 system, copy the files in C:\Windows\IME\IMEJP\DICTS to the same location on the affect 1803 machine and reboot.
Best Answer
It's because your folder names aren't encoded in UNICODE, but SJIS.
Windows, since Vista, has Asian fonts preinstalled by default
You have to change the default encoding for Windows, but this is gonna cause a lot of trouble for all other western applications.
How to do that? (actual wording may change because I don't have Windows in English)
Be warned that most western applications will be affected (for example, even windows explorer will display C:¥windows¥system32 instead of C:\windows\system32)
If the folders are few, it's better to manually recover the name with an encoding converting tool