How to fix my locale to display Unicode correctly in irssi?

Question

I've just arrived in my new lab and japan and the server I can use has only Japanese locales. A call to locale -a returns

C
POSIX
ja_JP
ja_JP.eucjp
ja_JP.ujis
ja_JP.utf8
japanese
japanese.euc

So I changed my environment variables and now my locale is set to ja_JP.utf8 which should support Unicode just fine. A call to locale now returns (changed from eucjp):

LANG=ja_JP.utf8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_TIME="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_PAPER="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_NAME="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="ja_JP.utf8"
LC_ALL=

I can read file containing Japanese characters in Unicode just fine, whether I'm using less, emacs or vim and connecting from PuTTY or a remote xterm with cygwin. It also seem to display other Unicode characters fine.

But here comes the problem: if I type something in Japanese it seems to go wrong. I like to use IRC and for some reason, while I can read perfectly fine any Japanese character if I type something it's sent as garbage for other people. I'm using the configuration found here http://xkr47.outerspace.dyndns.org/howtos/irssi-utf-8-guide.txt

I'm getting these results for /set charset

term_charset = utf-8
recode_out_default_charset = ISO-8859-15

and /set recode

recode = ON
recode_autodetect_utf8 = ON
recode_fallback = ISO-8859-15
recode_out_default_charset = ISO-8859-15
recode_transliterate = ON

If you have suggestions, please try to think of a way which doesn't require root rights if possible since it would take forever for the administrator to actually do something on the server. I've looked up a lot online about locale but I didn't find anything about this problem.

Answer 1

So as determined in comments, Irssi was configured to convert messages to ISO-8859-15 when sending them, instead of UTF-8.

Change the output charset using:

/set recode_out_default_charset UTF-8

---

Also, if you're in mixed-charset channels, /set recode_fallback Shift-JIS might be useful (it changes the received-message decoding). Irssi will always try UTF-8 first, but if the decoding fails, it'll use the recode_fallback next.