Oralce 8i Japanese OS UTF8

We have Oracle 8i configured to store UTF8 characters encodings (the NLS_CHARACTERSET parameter in NLS_DATABASE_PARAMETERS is UTF8).

The database stored data input through a web browser, passed to a java Servlet, and then inserted using the thin oracle jdbc drivers. The servletResponse ContentType includes a "charset=UTF-8" value. And characters are correctly passed through and retrieved to the database when the browser encoding is set to utf-8.

I have an English Windows 2000 Professional workstation, configured for Native Japanese support (the locale and default language settins are all set for japanese). When I run Oracle tools such as sqlplus, Toad, etc, and select japanese columns input via the web, the characters shown are not correct. I assume this is because the operating system is expecting shift-JIS characters, and oracle is just returning raw UTF-8 data...

If I manually insert or update columns using sqlplus and the Windows IME, the characters come back as entered, however, trying to pull up one of those records through the web-app causes oracle to throw an error (cannot convert utf-8 to ucs2 - or something like that). I would like to have consistent characters in the database from both web-based and manual inserts.

So, my question boils down to the following: Is there a way to configure the NLS_LANG value in the registry of the Win2k Japanese computer so that it can map between the OS Shift-JIS and the database UTF-8? I've tried using parameters of JAPANESE_JAPAN.UTF8 and JAPANESE_JAPAN.JA16SJIS but neither one seems to help with this problem.

Is there something else that I'm missing? Received on Mon Aug 13 2001 - 00:53:59 CDT