Problems with Chinese and code stripping

I’ve tried searching for information with no success and honestly I’m not sure exactly what I should be looking for.

I’ve set up a new blog for my wife (bomdia.uselessrobot.org) and for the most part everything comes up fine, but every so often a character here and there disappears. I think I’ve narrowed down the problem to WordPress’ over-zealous code stripping.

One specific problem I noticed was when someone left a comment which started with an english word, following by a “!” followed by a few chinese characters and ending with another “!”

There was no space between any of the characters. Upon posting the chinese and exclamation marks disappeared. Adding a space between the first mark and the chinese caused the chinese to reappear.

The second problem I’ve seen, which someone on these boards asked about but no one ever answered is with regards to Japanese-type smilies. They like using these, “^” which when put around a character makes it a superscript.

What I’d like to do is disable some of these specific functions without removing other formatting which is useful.

I don’t want to resort to posting a list of instructions telling visitors what can or can’t do. Most of the visitors to this blog aren’t all that technically savvy, and they’re used to being able to enter text a certain way. I’d like to make the experience as seamless of possible for them.

Any help would be much appreciated.