@Moderator: I am not clear about the roots of my problem. That is why I posted in such a general group. Please feel free to move my post to the correct group.
My Kodi doesn’t display japanes or cyrilic characters in filenames (over Samba). There are only boxes.
This is default Kodi 17.1 (2:17.1+dfsg1-3) from Debian unstable repository. It is the defalut skin (estuary).