Hello, thanks for responding! Now after doing a few tests (inspired by your reply :)) I realized some of the stuff in my previous post was not completely correct/relevant.
What I have found out is that my *nix box stores Japanese file names in UTF-8 but Windows XP stores them in Shift JIS!!!
I found that out by doing something like this:
ls | iconv -f sjis -t utf8
Now I just wonder what's the best thing to do... (and asking friend google etc) :)
Thanks!