title: displaying Japanese characters retrieved from MySQL in R
body: <p>I am struggling to display Japanese characters in a dataframe, which have been retrieved from a MySQL database using the RMySQL package. Japanese characters display fine if I paste a string from the database into a variable, which then has the Encoding 'UTF-8'. The Encoding of the dataframe column is 'unknown' and I haven't managed to change it using iconv. </p>
  
  <p>A line of the database is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>1.00    20120801    4520000000000.00    1.00    379.00  142.00  北日本フード　スーパー極上キムチ　３３０ｇ
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Retrieved using:</p>
  
  <pre><code>rs &lt;- dbSendQuery(con, "select * from sales");
  data &lt;- fetch(rs, n=-1)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>First row of data:</p>
  
  <pre><code>1     1 20120801 4.52e+12        1   379    142 ?????????????????????\r
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any help greatly appreciated.</p>