What might cause drupal to give me Japanese values for the user profile, when the site is set to English?
Using a debugger and some spot googling, I finally found an answer for this.  In my language detection and selection options I had session turned on as one of the means of detection, and saw that the query variable used for setting this option was language.  adding ?language=en to the end of my url caused the language to switch back and stay that way, but I am not sure how it got that way in the first place, or how to make sure it doesn't happen unintentionally again without disabling the session option.