Japanese Characters Encoding Problem

Question

Hi All,
I have been looking at the problems posted in this forum and quite a few describe the issue I am facing currently but none has been able to provide a solution.
The problem I am facing is as follows:
Step 1: I am retrieving Japanese data from Oracle DB 9i (Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.6.0 - 64bit) using standard JDBC API calls. [NLS_CHARACTERSET : AL32UTF8,  NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET : AL16UTF16]
byte[] title = resultSet.getBytes("COLUMN_NAME");
Step 2: I pass the retrieved bytes to a method that returns SJIS encoded String.
private String getStringSJIS(byte[] bytesToBeEncoded) {
          StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
          try {
               if (title != null) {
                    ByteArrayInputStream bais = new ByteArrayInputStream(bytesToBeEncoded);
                    InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(bais, "SJIS");
                    for (int c = isr.read(); c != (-1); c = isr.read()) {
                         sb.append((char) c);
               return sb.toString();
          } catch (Exception ex) {;}
3) I am using an HTML Parser JAR to print the decimal value of the Encoded String.
String after = getStringSJIS(title);
System.out.println(Translate.encode(after));
I get an output of String 1: ﾂ禿ｺﾂ本ﾂ古ｪﾂサﾂイﾂト
which contains 14 decimal character codes.
The same data is being read by another application that uses JDBC again and connects to the same DB and returns the decimal values as: String 2: 日本語サイト
The display of these two Strings differ significantly when viewed in the browser.
It seems String 1 contains single byte half-width characters and String 2 does not. Is anyone familiar as to why the bytes are getting modified while being retrieved from the Database for the same column value?

Answer 1

The encoding for the bytes being returned from the database is Cp1252 but this encoding, I understand, depends on the underlying platform I am using.
If indeed the data from the DB is in UTF-8 or 16, shouldn't it be displayed correctly in the browser? No encoding/decoding should be required on the data then. In the browser it gets displayed as “ú–{ŒêƒTƒCƒg. (The encoding of the JSP page is set to UTF-8.)