Bug in japanese charset mappings?

I've run into what seems like an old bug in the character set mapping 
for japanese encoding while trying to extract data from my database 
using the Java JDBC driver. The problem has to do with the japanese 
full-width wave dash.

This problem was brought up by Tom O'Dowd way back in February but 
doesn't seem to have been fixed yet. His original post can be seen at:

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2003-02/msg00328.php

Can someone tell me what the status of this 'bug' is? Is it really a bug 
in postgres. If it is a bug it doesn't seem to have been fixed since I 
am experiencing the same problem using 7.3.3.

Is there an easy work around?

Thanks,

Jean-Christian Imbeault