解码php字符串中的日文字符?

I am using cURL in PHP to scrap a webpage. Some of the words that I need to get are Japanese characters. I'm also using the Simple DOM Parser to help me parse the source code easily. I am having a little trouble figuring out how to properly obtain the Japanese characters. Everytime I run the following script on my page I get that there is no data received. I'm thinking that I need to somehow convert the characters to UTF-8 standard, but I'm not entirely sure how to do that. It grabs all of the English characters just fine though, so I know that the script does work. It just doesn't work for other characters. Does anyone think they can help me out? I have included a sample of what the source code I'm scrapping looks like as well.

CODE:

        $base = '{website url}';

        $curl = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, array('User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0'));
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $base);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_REFERER, $base);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
        $str = curl_exec($curl);
        curl_close($curl);

        // Create a DOM object
        $html = new simple_html_dom();
        // Load HTML from a string
        $html->load($str);

        foreach($html->find('div.holder') as $element){
            if($element->find('div.img-small', 0)){

                $title = '';
                $image = '';

                foreach($element->find('a[href]') as $tempElement){
                    if($tempElement->find('img')){
                        $image = $tempElement->find('img')->src;
                    } else {
                        $title = $tempElement->innertext;

                    }
                }

                echo $title.'<br/>';





            }       
        }

DATA:

<div class="holder">
    <div class="img-small">
        <a href="/link/abcd"><img src="/images/image.png"></a>
    </div>

    <div>
        <div>
            <img title="This is a title" class="valign" src="/images/image.png"><b>
                <a href="/link/1234abcd">{Japanese characters}</a>
        </div>          
    </div>
</div>

Put this on top of the page

<head>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" Content="text/html; charset=euc-jp">
</head>