NJMatsuya Photography

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Yay – I’m finally able to type in Japanese on WordPress!  I wasn’t able to do so when I was writing about my Kusatsu experiences because of character encoding issues.  Every time I tried writing any Japanese characters, they would display as question marks (??????)

However, after searching around (yay for Google), I found that commenting out 2 lines in the wp-config.php file resolves this issue.

Just for reference, in case anyone stumbles across this post while trying to resolve the same issue, the following lines need to be commented out:

define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);

Commenting out is easily done, by adding two forward slashes in front of those lines, like so:

//define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
//define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Just remember: BACKUP your original wp-config file – work on a copy, so that you can always restore the original file if something goes wrong!

As a final note, also make sure that permissions to the file are correctly set – for some reason, uploading the edited file removes some of the original permissions, and I have to manually reset them to match the original settings.

Final note!  I would recommend using a program such as Notepad (or even better, Notepad++) to make any edits.  I originally tried Dreamweaver but that scrambled something and WP wouldn’t even let me access the admin logon page anymore…  (x_x)