The ? marks are a dead giveaway that non-printable ANSI characters are being pushed into an ANSI column or variable (i.e. VARCHAR or CHAR). The hollow squares might be a problem if some of your characters are multi-byte Unicode characters, of which I think Japanese has a few. SQL Server (at least 2005) does not handle multi-byte character sets. SQL 2012 introduced some support for them through Collations. PS The squares could also be a simple display issue depending on what you're viewing the data with. You can always check by using the SUBSTRING() and UNICODE() or ASCII() functions to see what is actually stored.