Unicode Problems

[Spaceman-Spiff]

I'm working on a new website that uses 3 softwares: SMF 1.1, Drupal 6, and formFIELDS (form generation/submission tool, from now will be referred as FF). All of the pages are using UTF-8 charset.

When handling Unicode text, in this case Japanese, SMF and Drupal (and phpMyAdmin) behaves the same way. When I post 日本語 on SMF or Drupal, it appears identical in phpMyAdmin. However, when using FF, it appears like: "日本語" in phpMyAdmin (though it always appear fine when viewed in FF).

Now the problem comes when trying to display the fields stored using FF in a page that includes SMF's SSI.php. Example:
- http://opdb.info/chara/nossi.php (plain db query without SSI.php)
- http://opdb.info/chara/ssi.php (with SSI.php)

The first entry was edited directly on phpMyAdmin so it was reversed.

I've been trying to modify the database tables from using utf8 collation to others, also tried using PHP functions: utf8_encode and utf8_decode when retrieving the data, but with no success.

Been trying to solve the problem in the past week. If anyone can shed some light or provide any solution I would really appreciate it.

My last resort will be to dive in to FF codes, but I don't wanna go there yet. If there's some way to convert these unicode texts, it would be preferable...