help with decoding or something like that.

[PokeTech]

I was recently given some information to put in my mysql and well its in there but there's a couple of fields that are supposed to be in japanese and so here's an example:

フã‚

And supposedly you can turn that into japanese characters or something like that. Like I've heard something about encoding and utf-8 and I'm not really sure what that is cause I've never dealt with this before.

If anybody could help me out with this it would be appreciated.