I'm spending too much time on this 😊
I just uploaded a cleaned up version of Henry Minsky's openacs-japanese-325-patches file to the SDM. It only does internationalization changes (unlike Henry's version!), and it does not have shift-jis hardwired into it anywhere.
It has not had much testing at all yet, but it would be great to see how well it works for others as well as for me. The patch is
patch #44.