Bamshee,
try pasting the text into Notepad and then into WP. Notepad will strip out most ugly formatting and font info but preserve the tildes.
you WILL lose bold, italics, and hotlinks.
i have no idea if this will work for Japanese – probably not, actually. I think you’ll need to install a Japanese version of WP for that. But Spanish, German, etc should work.
dave
austin videogame writer