stuffing japanese text into a variable
 

I have a spreadsheet that has Japanese names in a range of cells. I
would like to stuff the Japanese into a variable and move the contents
of the variable -- call it NAME -- to another application. Whenever I
try to assign the japanese text to NAME, I generate an error -- run-
time error 1004.

I do not believe the text is unicode.

I have dimmed NAME as string. Should I change it to another data type,
if so, which one?
Is there a way to convert my japanese text to japanese unicode?

as always, thanks in advance ...