Han unification

Question

I am wondering how Java deals with the issues of Han unification (also known as CJK unification). The basic problem is that a single Unicode character (e.g. U+5203) should be displayed one way in a Japanese locale and a different way in a Korean or Chinese locale.
I am trying to write an applet that supports both Japanese and Korean, where the server can control which language the applet should display via an applet parameter. I am trying to do this using logical fonts if at all possible, since physical fonts vary so much from one platform to another.
I have studied how fontconfig.properties files work (see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/intl/fontconfig.html), but I was disappointed to find that the sequence lines are interpreted only with initial values. The syntax of these lines is documented as
sequence.allfonts.Encoding.Language.Country=...
but Encoding, Language, and Country are determined by the user's environment, and cannot be overridden programmatically.
All Swing controls already have the concept of locale, so I'm surprised that they don't use it when selecting fonts. I did try calling JComponent.setDefaultLocale in my applet's init() method, but it didn't change the fonts.
Is there a programmatic way of doing this that I have missed?
Is this something that could be slated for version 5.1? It seems to me to be possible without an API change.
If not, what about Mustang?

Answer 1

This code displays a MessageDialog with one Chinese/Japanese/Korean character:
MessageDialog d = new MessageDialog("\u5203");
await d.ShowAsync();
Here you can take a look at how this character should be displayed depending on the language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
(look for "knife edge" in the Wikipeadia page to find it)
On my 3 test computers, always the Japanese variant is displayed (although Chinese is set as primary language for Windows)