Japanese unicdoe properties file

Question

I have a japanese resource bundle file in SJIS encoding (*.properties)
I used native2ascii from JDK and convert SJIS to unicode.
Then read japanese ( in unicode properties file ) from servlet and send to IE browser.
but IE will display all "?" s
On the other hand it display correctly if I use SJIS encoded properties file. ( which has a problem -- all SJIS character with "/" character will need to manully escaped "//" )
I wonder why unicode properties file doesn't work?? I thought we should always convert properties file to unicode to avoid the escape problem of "/" character.
thanks

Answer 1

Regardless of charset, all HTML files should begin with an appropriate charset meta tag.
The JSP for this:
<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" %>
The HTML for this:
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
What charset encoding are sending to the IE browser? Is it UTF-8? UTF-16? something else?
Regards,
John O'Conner