the Japanese is displaying as question marks instead of the Japanese characters. I have set the tables AND row Collation in my database to utf8_general_ci. And the database thats using the Japanese and mysqls main Collation also to utf8_general_ci.

every file on my website has the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
I have even opened every page on the site with notepad++ selected encoding --> UTF-8 and saved each one.

yet the Japanese displays as ?? AND comparing queries result in no match even if it does match . if i just open phpmyadmin I can see the Japanese text plainly. i can edit it and preform queries in it fine.
but php queries dont compare and output question marks.

if I insert Japanese from php it appears to work. if i look at the inserted record in phpmyadmin it looks like . while all the other Japanese entries look like Japanese. and comparing and outputting queries with the messed up entry actually work.

I dont know what is left to set to UTF-8? or perhaps i gotta reset something for all the changes to take effect? or something else? any help?