You should as well indicate the Operating system and Web browser you are using... -- HJH
The characters VA, VI, VE, VO are included in the Unicode standard but they are not in the "traditional" Katakana set. Apparently, they are new characters added to the Japanese language (any Japanese native to confirm this?), that may explain why the browser fails to display them until the fonts are updated with the new glyphs. On my IE 5.5, the missing characters are shown as dots, but they are different from the middle dot ・ character.