Language characters

[martyn 2 russell bt com]

Can someone tell me why when I run my application in my locale (being en_GB
or en_US) I don't see chinese/japanese characters?

I have a list of contacts and one of them has his name in chinese.  I do not
see the correct figures, instead I see two blocks with the character codes
written in them.  If I log out of gdm, and then log back in using the
appropriate language, all the characters are shown correctly. Why?

Regards,
Martyn