Changing the Locale in WINE

I had to edit /etc/locale.gen and un-comment these two lines:

ja_JP.EUC-JP EUC-JP
ja_JP.UTF-8 UTF-8

After that, I ran locale-gen (as root), and when it finished generating locales simply setting LANG=ja_JP.utf8 worked. The key was generating locale information first, it seems.

Also, if you haven't got any, you'll need to install a japanese font on your system.

My distribution is Debian Sid, if anyone wonders, but I believe this is also what you need to do in Arch and Ubuntu and most other distros.

in Ubuntu 13.04 i had to use

LANG="ja_JP.UTF8" wine YourBinary.exe

LC_ALL="ja_JP"

another example to do it ;)