So I found subtitles for Homeland in Japanese on this site http://www.subs4movies.com/ . I think someone here may have linked it, but I can't find the topic. It's great, except I downloaded subtitles for an episode and the encoding appears to be wrong. So I open it in KMPlayer and see a bunch of gibberish. Timed gibberish, mind you, but gibberish nonetheless. I also opened it up in Notepad and it's the same thing. Tried to change the encoding to UTF-8 in Notepad but it didn't make a difference, I guess because it was already ASCII. Are there any other sites I can find Japanese subtitles for Western shows?

Hmm... I had a similar problem recently with Windows 7 where are Japanese became boxes or weird characters in subtitle files. Changing the encoding didn't work but when i searched Google it said it was a common problem. I followed the instructions (I think deleting a font cache and then rebooting) and then all the Japanese characters appeared fine again

Sounds like you maybe have the same issue