Displaying Unicode Text On Page?

I have gone through my DB and code so far, I have hit a problem. For a particular enrty in my DB I pick up descriptions and tags (both are strings)for japanese language. Now, in a ASP.NET page,the description is shown fine but the tags which are japanese as well, are replaced with ? marks, what am I doing wrong here? The same page displays description fine but within a <div>, tags are replaced by ? marks. The code is as follows

string[] tags = (Html.Encode(Item.Tags)).Split(new Char[] {',','.'});

in a loop over tags i have

<% Html.Encode(tags)%> // This is not fine!

While for description I have

<% Html.Encode(Item.Description)%> // This is fine!