Japanese characters - utf-8 encoding problem

[eluser]yosh[/eluser]
Hi, first post, so would just like to say thankyou for making codeigniter available to the public, it's an awesome bit of kit.

Using WAMP, CI and Doctrine and following Buraks fantastic tutorials I am trying to set up my first MVC page, which has worked but all the Japanese characters from mysql display as ? instead of the character ス for example.

In phpmyadmin the characters display properly, tho I did have to change the settings first.

The view file header is set to:
http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"

config.php charset is set to utf-8, as are the database settings in doctrine

Had the same problem using php directly until adding mysql_set_charset before the query, as some other posts suggested but I can't see where this would go if this is a solution for codeigniter. Assuming there isn't a setting that's been overlooked somewhere?

Any help greatly appreciated...