I'm using Fedora Core 5 and can read and write Japanese in my email client, my desktop, my word processor (Open Office, which I believe also uses Java), my web browser, my xterm window, and every other application. So the issue of fonts being installed isn't a problem. The issue of being able to input or read Japanese system-wide isn't a problem. The problem is exclusive to LimeWire, and seems to be something that's at the rpm or source level -- somehow it has not been compiled with proper Japanese support. Which makes me think that perhaps I need to try recompiling from source instead of using the rpm. Perhaps that will help.

Either way, thank you for the suggestion. It may indeed be some option that I'm missing that for some reason is causing ONLY LimeWire to not work properly, but I've tried using an entirely Japanese desktop and LimeWire still came up the same way. I suspect there's another problem, perhaps one more unique to my system config or something. Clearly not too many people are having this issue or there'd be more out there on what's going wrong... :-)