Thanks for the insight into things courage.

While I still think something is amiss, and so I'll post again, use Encode did solve my problems; however, here's what I don't get.

$s2u = Text::Iconv->new("sjis", "utf-8");
$x = $s2u->convert($str);
$x = decode("utf-8",$x); #Causes Perl to correctly treat the string as
+ unicode because utf-8 flag is on [oi].
[download]

I should not have to decode something that should already be in utf-8 format, no?
but anyways, thanks to that this works and I can move on.
But something still doesn't seem right...