I mean Java had Unicode support right out the door in 1995. Not that it's a wonderful text processing language, but you'd think 17 years is plenty of time to catch up...
Supporting Unicode circa 1995 was good, but supporting an outdated version of Unicode incompletely isn't great. Per Tom Christiansen, JDK7 looks like the minimum required Java version to do modern Unicode correctly.
http://training.perl.com/OSCON2011/index.html