SOAP Payload problem

Hi,

I am facing a strange problem when I send a string thorugh soap. I am taking
japanese characters from the browser, My HTTP charset is set to utf-8
through the META tag. I get this Japanese String in a java String object. At
the client side before SOAP call invocation what i observe is that the
single japanese charater got converted into 3 characters. After the SOAP
packet is sent at the Server side I found that the 3 characters got
converted into 6 characters. As a result of this when I get back these
characters to the browser I see 2 Japanese characters different from the
sigle japanese character that I sent. Please advise me what is going wrong.


Thanks
Akhil