Help! livewire+informix application

Does anybody have any experience of internationalization of a livewire application that uses informix database ? I have developed the english version of livewire application using informix as database engine. However, i found that the same application can't accept japanese text input and store it in the database. Informix returns the error saying that the "prepare" statement includes illegal characters. I suppose it's because japanese characters use non-printable characters. Strangely, if the database field is the "text" data type instead of "char", no problem happens. However, I would like to avoid declare all the fields as "text". I have already post this message in the "livewire" newsgroup but no reponse from anybody. Does anybody have any idea about what to do ? Kenji