Update:
So, I can read Japanese .txts fine, and ONE of my Japanese news site feeds comes in ok (yomiuri) (The news stories' text are fine, but the table of contents is ???). However, the other two japanese feeds and the chinese news feed is nothing but ???.
In terms of figuring out trends, my generally working yomiuri rss comes from here:
http://rss.yomiuri.co.jp/rss/yol/topstories, while my other news sites come from .xml files like:
http://feeds.lifehacker.jp/rss/lifehacker/index.xml
Could it be that the other sites are xml that is messing me up?