font-selection seems broken for many non-ascii charsets

[Miles Bader]

Sometime recently, font selection (and some other stuff) seems to have
broken for me in many cases -- in particular, Japanese and most other
non-ascii fonts now render completely as empty boxes, though they worked
fine for many years previously.  [Chinese, Thai, and some european
characters still display correctly though.]

Also for some reason Emacs seems to default to using black-and-white
versions of things like icons and the startup splash screen picture,
though I have a true-color display.

I'm not exactly sure how to debug this; it could very well be a change
in my system -- though I have lots of fonts installed (both scalable and
bitmap, and I have "scalable-fonts-allowed" set to t), I've recently
upgraded to X version 6.9 (from x.org), which reflects a somewhat large
change in the packaging of X.

Any hints about useful things to for debugging?

There also seems to be a weird disconnect between what "x-list-fonts"
says and what will be accepted by `M-x set-default-font':  for instance,
the font "shinonome-gothic", which I previously used to use a lot, is
present:

   (x-list-fonts "*-shinonome-gothic-medium-r-*-16-*")
   => ("-shinonome-gothic-medium-r-normal--16-150-75-75-c-80-iso8859-1" 
"-shinonome-gothic-medium-r-normal--16-150-75-75-c-80-jisx0201.1976-0" 
"-shinonome-gothic-medium-r-normal--16-150-75-75-c-160-jisx0208.1983-0" 
"-shinonome-gothic-medium-r-normal--16-150-75-75-c-160-jisx0208.1990-0")

But if I try to use it:  

   (set-default-font (car (x-list-fonts "*-shinonome-gothic-medium-r-*-16-*")))

   Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Font 
`-shinonome-gothic-medium-r-normal--16-150-75-75-c-80-iso8859-1' is not 
defined")
     modify-frame-parameters(#<frame address@hidden 0x85e1d98> ((font . 
"-shinonome-gothic-medium-r-normal--16-150-75-75-c-80-iso8859-1")))
     
set-default-font("-shinonome-gothic-medium-r-normal--16-150-75-75-c-80-iso8859-1")
     eval((set-default-font (car (x-list-fonts 
"*-shinonome-gothic-medium-r-*-16-*"))))

...

help?

Thanks,

-Miles
-- 
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that
 you do it."  Mahatma Gandhi