Using Japanese Characters in MATLAB

I am trying to write a program in Matlab that will display Japanese words stored in an excel in hiragana, katakana, and kanji. However, whenever I import the excel file, it 'blank-spaces' all non-romanji characters. Is there a way to make this work?

I am running R2009a

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

There are some relevant older discussions that might point the way: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/6248-displaying-in-the-prompt-latin-characters-such-as-and-using-matlab-r2010b-r2011 and http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/6347-arabic-document

[Kyle]

Those were slightly revealing but neither really covered something I am trying to do. At least, not in a way that gave me enough information to get an answer. They spoke about changing your local but I couldn't find any sort of options like that in MATLAB. If anyone could give me some more detailed instruction, I would greatly appreciate it.