--
OK, looks like s/[^128-277].//sg yanked enough out.

I'm still figuring out what some non-displayable
characters are, but it does look like I didn't lose any Japanese text.
with the above regexp.

(The goal here was to keep the Japanese and yank the English)

As far as encoding, Shift-JIS. This is actually my first
strange text obstacle, and I hope I have
very few, at least until I get a better handle on it.

Thanks again,
Felonious