A JSP page uses a character encoding. For encodings you can use, see:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/intl/encoding.doc.html
The encoding can be described explicitly using the pageEncoding attribute of the page directive. The character encoding defaults to the encoding indicated in the contentType attribute of the page directive if it is given, or to ISO-8859-1.
For more information, see the “Localization Issues” chapter of the JSP 1.2 specification, which you can be find at the following location:
http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/index.jsp
Also see the article Developing Multilingual Applications Using JavaServer Pages Technology at:
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/MultilingualJSP/index.html