Japanese, Unicode, Perl... oh my!

With the addition of unicode support in Perl 5.6.0, I was hoping to be able to
use some existing perl scripts (with minor modifications) on Japanese text. 
However, man perl-unicode explains that Perl can't read utf8 encoded text
files.    So the question is,

How does one get utf8 text into Perl 5.6 strings?

-- 
Neil Gower - Developer
iNAGO Incorporated
Toronto, Ontario.