[newbie] Japanese fonts

[Gavin]

Help,
I live in Japan and I sometime receive Mail in japanese, I've installed the 
japanese fonts and re-booted my system, when I tried to read to letter it 
still came out in an unreadable format example:
B$%^&&*((9##8(
The whole letter looks something like above, how can I get this letter into 
readable format?? this is very important for me being that I work with 
Japanese. I using the english version of Mandrake 7.2 (2.2.17) Desktop 
version.  HELP.. PLEASE

Sincerely,
Gavin (Japan)