Japanese text printing issue

[Ramanujam]

Hello. I am facing the following issue when printing through CUPS (though I am not sure if this is the right forum).

Setup:
Printer: Canon iP4100R
Driver: Cannon PIXUS iP4100R - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.0-rc1
Operating System: Ubuntu 8.10
$LANG = ja_JP.UTF-8

I developed a Java application (that uses a graphical object to print to a PrinterJob class) that prints text (of Japanese characters) to a printer.

When I run the app and give a print job, there is no japanese text is printed at all. I get characters from only within the ASCII subset printed instead.
Any suggestions on how I can get the text printed properly?

Some things I have checked/tried:
1. A print job from Windows XP/Vista (ja_JP env) gives the expected result.u
2. A sample print (to check if any japanese text can be printed at all) on a gedit text file that contains japanese text from the same Ubuntu test machine is able to print japanese characters properly.
3. I tried starting the app at the command prompt by setting the java flags -Dlanguage=ja -Dregion=JP. No luck.

Ramanujam