Problem: Can not write in Japanese and English using WordPress. Characters display as ? ?? ???

I was trying to figure out how to write in Japanese on my WordPress blog. All Japanese characters were coming up as question marks, appearing like “????? ? ?? ???” instead of characters. I searched for a solution to this and found a few plugins that did a ton of unnecessary things, and some didn’t work. I tried out Gengo but I didn’t like it very much. However if you’re reading this for a solution on how to write Japanese and English or translate your page it might work well for you! Here’s the link to Gengo.

If you’re running WordPress 2.2 or higher, then the Collation should be set correctly. Here’s a link to their documentation, and here’s an excerpt.

As of WordPress Version 2.2, DB_COLLATE was made available to allow designation of the database collation (i.e. the sort order of the character set). In most cases, this value should be left blank (null) so the database collation will be automatically assigned by MySQL based on the database character set (i.e. DB_CHARSET). Set DB_COLLATE to one of the UTF-8 values defined in Unicode character sets (utf8 section) (see dev.mysql.com) for most Western European languages.

Now if you are running an older version, or you upgraded from an older version, or for some reason things aren’t working out I’ll post my solution below. Read the rest of this entry »