It works for me.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use feature qw{ say };

use Encode qw{ decode };

my %utf8 = (
    japanese => "\xe6\x84\x9b",
    chinese  => "\xe5\x92\x8c\xe5\xb9\xb3",
    spanish  => "\x61\x6c\x65\x67\x72\xc3\xad\x61");

binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';
for my $language (keys %utf8) {
    my $decoded = decode('UTF-8', $utf8{$language});
    say join ', ', $language, length $decoded, $decoded;
}
[download]

Output (on a UTF-8 terminal):

chinese, 2, 和平
japanese, 1, 愛
spanish, 7, alegrķa