JDBC encoding problem

I'm having a rather strange problem that I'm hoping someone can help me
with. I'm using Struts 1.0/jsp on Debian linux under Tomcat 4.1.x and
the blackdown JVM . I'm attempting to convert my current SQL_ASCII
database to UNICODE. I'm new to this, so am most likely making a few
mistakes. Here's what I've done so far:

o Converted database encoding to be UNICODE. I'm pretty sure this part
worked okay. (did a pg_dump, then iconv -f 8859_1 -t UTF-8, then
created new db with encoding UNICODE and reloaded- no errors upon reload)

sparky:~$ psql -l
List of databases
Name | Owner | Encoding
-----------+----------+-----------
unitest | kurt | UNICODE
template1 | postgres | SQL_ASCII
(2 rows)

o set client_encoding to 'UTF8';

o In my JSP files, I set the following at the top of each:

<%@ page lanuage="java" pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>

Now, to test this, I go to a japanese page, copy some text, then paste
it into a form, that gets submitted to the server and saved into the DB.
Then I try to display what I got back from the database. It comes out
garbled. HOWEVER- if I leave the 'pageEncoding' out of my display .jsp
file it still comes out garbled, UNTIL I set UTF-8 manually in my
browsers Character Encoding settings (both mozilla and IE). Then the
japanese characters render fine (just like I entered them).

Very strange. What's confusing is that when I set the pageEncoding to
'UTF-8', the characters don't render properly, and as far as I can tell,
thats the same as manually setting the browser manually. I must be
doing something wrong because I get the same results in IE and mozilla
(recent build).

What may be the problem- I don't do anything differently when getting
the data out of the database, just standard
resultset.getString("column"); Do I need to change that call, to handle
the potentially UTF-8 encoded strings? I can't find anything on that at
all with google/usenet.

Any and all help, suggestions or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

/kurt