[I need help on japanese text]

I have problem on displaying japanese text from a data retrieved from Mysql. Displaying static text in HTML and with the use of declaring the japanese text in PHP it displays as japanese text. But once I retrieve a data from Mysql which is in japanese when it is displayed the only thing that appears are "??????".

configured mb_string to be utf8
also mysql and HTML utf-8

using Apache 2
Mysql 5
PHP 5