Japanese chars output as "?" or garbage val in rails app

Rails
1

Guys,
In my rails app the japanese chars output as “???” or garbage
value. I
have searched the forum get some help but I am not clear about the
tropic

I use InstantRails 1.4, In the package mysql version is 4.1.9.

So please help me in the points

0.What will be the mysql(version 4.1.9) collation? (I used
latin1_swedish_ci)

  1. any change in database.yml configuration?

  2. What will be the charset in html meta tag?
    suppose I have

    is it right?

Any other changes need? Because I am new in Ruby so can not understand.
thanks.

Amin