Conversion of character in Office 97

Hello,I have a Word 97 document that was emailed to me from Japan, and I can’t read the characters. The characters that are displayed look like small little squares.The operating system on this machine is Windows ME. When I read this document on other machines with Win2k, WinME, Win 95/98 it is ok. So why can’t the document display in it’s right format on this machine. Can someone pls help.
Kind Regards
Dave