Can someone tell me a bit more about the Monitor? When I click the box on the top left to show incoming searches, I see mostly japanese Kanji characters. What is going on there?

Well, it looks like you're in Hawaii, and LimeWire does some things to try and query nearby nodes before querying nodes further away. Hawaii isn't horribly far from Japan, so a lot of Japanese Gnutella nodes are probably querying Hawaiian Gnutella nodes.

(LW actually tries to first query nodes that can respond quickly, but response time is getting closer and closer to being limited by signal propagation speed... especially in areas connected to the rest of the world by satellite links and/or long underwater cables... places like Japan and Hawaii. This means that the quickly responding nodes are likely to be geographically nearby.)