I have a suspicion that your file gets munged when acme reads it as acme is expecting valid unicode and ms-kanji is not valid unicode. I think you have no option but to translate to/from MS outside acme.
If this is a common problem for you then you could write a little file server which envokes tcs to translate to and from an ms-kanji transparently and run it behind acme (so acme inherits its namespace). -Steve
