This is using the Sysreset mIRC package by the way.
view: font: ms mincho, script japanese, utf-8 display and encode
then tools: options, irc:messages, sjis uncheck, and check all of these:
multibyte display, multibyte editbox, utf-8 display, font linking, and parse ansi codes
In other news, I was playing with Windows because I got a 2.2GHz P4 for $60. The RAM is only 256 megs, and the hard drive is only 40 gigs, but those are easy enough to fix. I will upgrade it to Ubuntu once the hardware is upgraded. Yay Craigslist.