Having taken some of the suggestions above it looks like we are working fine. But it is true that we use Shift-JIS for web input/output through our Java Web Service application. The Oracle Database is in UTF-8 however. I have never even thought about the scenario you just mentioned since everything is working so well. I am used to the Java world where this difference is transparent to us. I greatly appreciate your pointing this out and will send this information to our DB Admins back in America.