[tlug] HTML Best Text Bridge?

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

Generally if someone sends me text, it's just embedded in the e-mail, 
but I was sent an MS-Word file in Japanese last week.  It opened fine 
with OpenOffice, so I figured that plain text would be no problem.  
Thus, I asked a friend who wanted to give me some Japanese text on a 
floppy to save it as plain text.  I was then surprised to see that it 
doesn't open in OpenOffice, SciTE, or EditPad Pro (or more precisely, it 
opens, but is bakemoji).  So, to open it (with readable text), I went 
through the following steps:
1) I opened it with an old (off-line) W-box, 2) Copy-pasted it over to 
Netscape Composer, 3) Saved it as an HTML file, 4) Put the floppy in my 
Linux computer (SuSE 9.3), transfered the file and opened it with 
FireFox, 5) Seeing that it was Shift_JIS, I opened a blank Mozilla 
Composer page and copy pasted it there and then saved it as UTF-8.
Since I have a work-around for this, I'm okay, but I'm wondering why I 
can open an MS-Word file but not a plain text file - I would have 
expected things to be the other way around.  I guess the best thing is 
to ask my friend to save any future files as HTML?  Or what should I be 
using to open a plain text file made with W-XP?  (My friend doesn't have 
OpenOffice and has fairly low computer skills - even lower than mine.)
Lyle