I did have a customer (dotcom that went under) that used AOLserver 3.3ad13 with Henry Minsky's patches with OpenACS 3.2.5.
From memory, here is what you need to know:
1. The patches may reference one or two files that do not exist - these can be safely ignored.
2. The patches may not cover a needed one or two line change to ns_sendmail or to the ecommerce mailing code.
3. The big problem with configuring for Japanese when you can't read Japanese is that you will not be able to tell when the page is correct.
Wrongly configured servers will still set the charset such that you will see what looks like Japanese in the browser, but it will be immediately apparent as gibberish to someone who can read Japanese.
A possible fix is to have the customer make a sample html page in Japanese; load it on their browser and print it out (or take a screenshot) so you can visually determine correctness.
4. I did not have any problems with the Postgres side of things. I believe I did use the encoding of either Unicode or jp-2022 (I think) when creating the database. You can do this by exporting the variable PG_ENCODING or passing the proper flags to Postgres when you create the database. I seem to recall setting PG_ENCODING as an environment variable when starting the AOLserver process as well.
Hope this helps. If you run into other issues, I think I have a tarball of the relevant pieces. Just let me know what you need.
