MySQL 8.0 FAQ: MySQL Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Character Sets • Determine the hexadecimal value of the character or characters that are not being displayed correctly . • Make sure that a round trip is possible. When you select  literal  (or  _introducer hexadecimal-value ), do you obtain  literal  as a result ? • Make sure that the problem is not with the browser or other application, rather than with MySQL . 5260 If you cannot control the server settings, and you have no idea what setting your underlying computer uses, try changing to a common character set for the country that you’re in ( euckr  = Although Unicode (usually the  utf8  variant on Unix, and the  ucs2  variant on Windows) is preferable to Latin, it is often not what your operating system utilities support best. Many Windows users find that a Microsoft character set, such as  cp932  for Japanese Windows, is suitable. These are typical character-set settings for an international-oriented client (notice the use of  utf8 Unicode) connected to a server in the West ( latin1  is a West Europe character set). To determine your settings, use the  SHOW VARIABLES  statement, whose output should resemble what is shown here: Use the  mysql  client program to accomplish this task. If  mysql  displays characters correctly but your application does not, your problem is probably due to system settings. For bug reports regarding such failures, we might ask you to follow up with  SELECT HEX(’ ペ ’); . Then we can determine whether the client encoding is correct. If the result is not also  ペ , the round trip failed. For example, the Japanese Katakana character  Pe  ( ペ ’ ) exists in all CJK character sets, and has the code point value (hexadecimal coding)  0x30da . To test a round trip for this character, use this query: 3F  is the encoding for the  ?  character; this means that  ?  is the character actually stored in the column. This most often happens because of a problem converting a particular character from your client character set to the target character set. You can obtain this information for a column  column_name  in the table  table_name  using the following query: SELECT HEX( column_name ) FROM  table_name ; SELECT ’ ペ ’ AS ‘ ペ ‘; /* or SELECT _ucs2 0x30da; */ mysql>  SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ’char%’; +--------------------------+----------------------------------------+ | Variable_name | Value | +--------------------------+----------------------------------------+ | character_set_client | utf8 | | character_set_connection | utf8 | | character_set_database | latin1 | | character_set_filesystem | binary | | character_set_results | utf8 | | character_set_server | latin1 | | character_set_system | utf8 | | character_sets_dir | /usr/local/mysql/share/mysql/charsets/ | +--------------------------+----------------------------------------+