What you have to determine is where the character translation failure is occurring. In db->java, jsp->html, or javascript->combo box
Thats at least three potential places for it to fail.
What do you mean by "hardcoding the string"? Hardcoding it into the javascript, or directly into the control?
What do you see when you view source on the generated JSP page?
Can you show a small example jsp?
Most probably you need to encode the correct content-type/page-encoding on the JSP.
<%@page pageEncoding="UTF-8" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"%>
Take a look at this article: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/HTTPCharset/