iterate through unicode strings and compare with unicode in python dictionary

I have two python dictionaries containing information about japanese words and characters:

1. vocabDic : contains vocabulary, key: word, value: dictionary with information about it

2. kanjiDic : contains kanji ( single japanese character ), key: kanji, value: dictionary with information about it

   Now I would like to iterate through each character of each word in the vocabDic and look up this character in the kanji dictionary. My goal is to create a csv file which I can then import into a database as join table for vocabulary and kanji.
   My Python version is 2.6
   My code is as following:
   

   kanjiVocabJoinWriter = csv.writer(open('kanjiVocabJoin.csv', 'wb'), delimiter=',', quotechar='|', quoting=csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL)
   kanjiVocabJoinCount = 1
   
   #loop through dictionary
   for key, val in vocabDic.iteritems():
       if val['lang'] is 'jpn': # only check japanese words
           vocab = val['text']
           print vocab
           # loop through vocab string
           for v in vocab:
                test = kanjiDic.get(v)
                print v
                print test
                if test is not None:
                   print str(kanjiVocabJoinCount)+','+str(test['id'])+','+str(val['id'])
                   kanjiVocabJoinWriter([str(kanjiVocabJoinCount),str(test['id']),str(val['id'])])
                   kanjiVocabJoinCount = kanjiVocabJoinCount+1
   

If I print the variables to the command line, I get:
vocab : works, prints in japanese
v ( one character of the vocab in the for loop ) : �
test ( character looked up in the kanjiDic ) : None

To me it seems like the for loop messes the encoding up.
I tried various functions ( decode, encode.. ) but no luck so far.
Any ideas on how I could get this working?
Help would be very much appreciated.