Storing Japanese text in latin1_swedish_ci collation table

[Christopher Mosses]

I have a Japanese website that stores Japanese text from an HTML form in a MySQL table that uses latin1_swedish_ci collation. When I browse the data with phpMyAdmin, the text is garbled. When displaying the text in a browser through a PHP page with
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=shift_jis">
in the header, the browser shows the text correctly.

It was the previous developer who thought it was OK to store Japanese characters in latin1_swedish_ci collation tables. Converting the collation is now not an option.

I am creating a PHP webservice that should return texts as unicode strings, but the text is coming out garbled, like when viewing it in phpMyAdmin. Is there a way I can convert the garbled text to unicode? Please help. Both MySQL tips and PHP tips are welcome. Thanks a lot.