i was googling the problem you described and the closest i got was some people's ipod could not display japanese (or chinese) id3 tags correctly. i'm not sure if the "lyric" portion (which is where i suspect the text are located) is also part of the id3 tags or something else...
anyway, the url i found was this,
http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.ph ... adid=25514
a few people in there had this problem with displaying chinese and japanese. they realize it's coz the id3 tags were not in unicode and they had to convert. there are instructions in there that talks abt converting from non-unicode to unicode as well.
hope it's useful for you.