Are you sure your page encoding (the one in HTTP header, not the one in
meta i.e. charset), is a unicode  enable one(like UTF-8)? (Can get this via
right click in Firefox and see Page Info-> Encoding)

I think the problem  is with in your page encoding. Change it to UTF-8 and
every thing will be all right. You can use JSP's "<%@ page
pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>" tag to achive this.