The Japanese fonts for JDK1.5/SLES-9.0 seems to work. Heres the workaround. Workaround to get the Japanese fonts working on JDK1.5/SLES-9.0 JDK-1.5 does not have the font properties file. Also SLES 9.0 does not have the true fonts files. These are needed for the Japanese fonts to work with the above mentioned platform. Steps. 1) Add the fontconfig.SuSE.properties file to the jre/lib. This contains the logical names of the fonts (their style, character set, etc). fontconfig.SuSE.properties can be found at this site: http://lists.suse.com/archive/m17n/2005-Jun/0019.html http://lists.suse.com/archive/m17n/2005-Jun/0019.html 2) This file contains the actual font file names, which are a bunch of .ttf files located in the directory specified. e.g. filename.-misc-sazanami_gothic-medium-r-normal--*-%d-*-*-c-*-jisx0208.19 83-0=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/sazanami-gothic.ttf filename.-misc-sazanami_mincho-medium-r-normal--*-%d-*-*-c-*-jisx0208.19 83-0=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/sazanami-mincho.ttf Get the true font files sazanami-gothic.ttf and sazanami-mincho.ttf from http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpackages/professional/sazanami-fonts .html <http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpackages/professional/sazanami-font s.html> and store them in the directory specified. /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/