character encoding?

[cummins jamstec go jp]

Hello,

   I was delighted when I tried the latest version of balsa
and found that it came up with Japanese menus, etc., because
I want to use it to read email in Japanese. However, I find
that, although I can send messages in Japanese OK, I cannot
read them. In some cases I can also not see the message I'm
sending after using the input method to input Japanese
characters.
  I presume this has something to do with the "encoding"
setting, whose default is ISO-8859-1. So, I'd like to change
this, but can anyone please tell me how to find out what
encodings are valid? I've tried semingly sensible things like 
UNICODE, JIS, ISO-2022-JP, but have had no success. I can
get some European characters showing up instead of Japanese,
but once that happens they won't go away, even if I return
the encoding to ISO-8859-1.
  Any suggestions appreciated.
Thanks,

- Phil Cummins