Some Japanese text is garbled on my PC

On Windows XP, I have Control Panel -- Regional and Language Options -- Languages -- Supplemental language support -- Install files for East Asian languages checked to on, and on most websites, Japanese text is displayed correctly. However, on some, it is still a garbled mess, like here:

http://www1.tcn-catv.ne.jp/hakucho/famicon.htm

For example, this is the first line of text I see on that website:

''Žž�eã‚Ì���‚ê‚Æ‚Æ‚à‚É�AŽ¸‚í‚ê‚‚‚ ‚éƒtƒ@ƒ~ƒRƒ�gƒƒtƒg�B''

Other websites look perfectly fine. It's the same situation whether I use Firefox or Internet Explorer, and when I try with my laptop, which is running Windows Vista. I assume a different character encoding is being used for ones that still display garbled text where there should be Japanese, but I really don't know for sure. Does anyone know what I can do to fix this problem?

There is more than one kind of character encoding for webpages and if the wrong one is chosen then the text will come out wrong.

In firefox, click on view - character encoding - Japanese (shift_JIS)

That makes the website you posted appear correct on my computer.

Awesome, thanks. I'm sure there's much more that I can/should learn about this, but I see in that menu I can also set the character coding to auto-detect for Japanese, and that seems to work, too.

Anyway, thanks for the help. Now I can finally try to read some of these websites. :P

I get the very same thing on just a few websites, even though my PC was purchased in Japan. I always thought that it was because I have a Mac and use Safari, but perhaps not. I wonder how I can see those pages properly?

In Safari, try View - Text Encoding - Japanese (Shift JIS) or Japanese (EUC)