Japanatron Logo
Mojibake (aka "junk text") is a horrible affliction that most computing in Japanese have encountered at some point.  Here are some simple fixes that I use with Microsoft Windows and Outlook.  These instructions are written with Windows 7 / Outlook 2010 in mind.

SOLUTION 1 - Mojibake in Received Email

Try re-selecting the encoding in Outlook.
1. Open the mail.
2. Click Actions, Other Actions, Encoding, and choose "Japanese (auto select)." Even if it's already chosen, please click it again.

SOLUTION 2 - Mojibake in Received Email
Convert the email to plain text. Sometimes the email is actually in plain text format, but Outlook misinterprets it as HTML (or it's converted in transit), causing the mojibake.
1. Highlight the message and click forward.
2. Click format text --> plain text. This will convert the message to plain text format, potentially fixing the encoding information.
3. Forward the email to yourself.
4. Try SOLUTION 1 above if the plain text email still appears as mojibake.

SOLUTION 3 - Mojibake in General
If you often encounter mojibake problems in other places / applications, try changing your system locale to Japanese. This requires admin privileges.
1. Start, Control Panel, Region and Language.
2. Administrative Tab, Change System Locale.
3. Change to Japanese. You will have to restart your PC.

Related Articles

MS Outlook - None of your emai...

PROBLEMYou send email to a recipient, but immediately receive an error bounce-back message that says "None of your email accounts could send to this recipient."...

Elastix PBX - Voicemail Disabl...

I ran a yum update process on my Elastix PBX, updating all the packages.  The update process completed without error; however, voicemail was disabled on all use...

Hardware Graphics Acceleration...

ISSUEMS applications like Outlook sometimes show garbled video when scrolling through emails, etc.  Internet Explorer may garble the video when working in Citri...

How to Find and Replace Text U...

After changing website templates I found that all instances of the <ul> html tag (used for bullets) no longer worked because the new template requires a c...