Lee -
You need to use the Japanese localized version of Visual Basic, then. It seems that the form engine part of VB 6 does not understand Unicode -- only ANSI (for US market). So if you want to display Hiragana or Katakana characters you need the version of VB for the Japanese market.
If you want to use those character sets to/from a database, that's fine, because that part of VB is fully Unicode enabled (UTF-16). Of course your database columns need to be NCHAR, NVARCHAR or NTEXT! But it will handle it.
Chip H.