Question concerning Unicode and or Shift-JIS

[Antioch]

Ok, so Im a newb python programmer and I'm trying to create a simple python web-application. The program is simply going to read in pairs of words, parse them into a dictionary file, then randomly display the key and prompt the user for the correct answer. Basically, its a digital flash card system with a modular "dictionary" file. 

The problem is this: I'm trying to create this program to help me study foregin languages (specifically Japanese at the moment) and when I save the txt file which houses the word pairs, it is automatically encoded into UTF. However, when getting user input, the input it natively sent to the program in Shift-JIS encoding. I downloaded CJKcodecs for python to encode a string into any number of Japanese codings, however the problem is I don't know how to "decode" the UTF and then recode it into Shift-JIS so that I can compare the dictionary values with the input values. OR, I could convert the input from Shift-JIS to UTF, but either way I don't know how to decode any of the codecs. I'm sure theres just some simple function call, but I have been unable to find it. 

Anyhelp would be appreciated!
Thanks =)