PHP, MySQL, and Japanese text

Hi all, I was hoping to find some code examples or tutorials on using PHP/MySQL with Japanese text. The site I've built is very close, but apparently a very small subset of the characters become garbage when pulled from the database into a form to be modified and resubmit to the database. Text in <textarea> tags seems immune -- it's only the text pulled into <input> tags. I've tried to follow the PHP documentation on handling multibyte characters but without practical examples it really just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I'm not currently using encoding or output buffering at all -- I've just set the language to be "shift_jis" in a meta tag. Thanks in advance, -Step