Character set doesn’t import from Blogger correctly

Hello,

Last night I made the leap to WordPress, and it was more or less painless. However, my blog uses the shift_JIS character set, and a good number of my posts are in Japanese. Unfortunately, this didn’t come into my WordPress import correctly and the content is mangled. Despite setting the display character set to shift_JIS or UTF-8, the posts are garbage. Additionally, the import dramatically changed my Blogger data, so all the Japanese source posts on Blogspot are now garbage as well.

After looking through the forums, I thought perhaps it had something to do with the character set of the mySQL database that made the read in faulty. Do I have to set the mySQL database to shift_JIS before import? Unfortunately, I know nothing at all about mySQL, but glancing at my web host’s admin panel, I’m running mySQL 4.0.16 and phpMyAdmin 2.7.0-pl2.

The brute force way is to copy the text from my offline backup and edit each one in WordPress, overwriting the contents, but I’d like to avoid this if possible.

My first priority is getting the Japanese text imported properly, but secondly I was thinking that maybe UTF-8 is a better way to go, since then I should be able to have more than just two languages in my blog (I’d like to add Chinese and French). If I take this route, however, any way I slice it, I have to convert the shift_JIS content from my old blog into UTF-8, which requires some sort of offline conversion, right? Do I need to change the setup of the mySQL server?

Has anyone had similar experiences? Can anyone help? (:|