htmltext to unicode

[Kee Nethery]

First, thanks to Devin Asay for the wonderful articles on Rev and Unicode.

Second, I'm going unicode with my code and I'm stumped.

There is a database I access and I get what appears to be HTML encoded text. For example:

I am not unicode text but what follows is:
セキュリティー 個人情報 代金返却方針 ヘルプ
And although I have no idea what that says, it is UTF8 in the database.

I think this is what revtalk refers to as htmltext. I'd like to put this into a field as unicode (UTF16). How do I display this as the characters or glyphs that it should be viewed as, and how do I get it into UTF16? 

-- horrific thought --
Am I going to have to manually convert these HTML entities into UFT16 using the numtochar function for each set? 

Kee Nethery