Sqlite3 corrupts some chars after importing

I have a tab-separated file with records like these:

no      Newcastle       1       NULL    NULL    NULL
uk      Ньюкасл 1       NULL    NULL    NULL
ja      ニューカッスル  1       NULL    NULL    NULL

To import them to sqlite, I use:

create table cities (country text, name text, count integer...);
.separator '    '
.import file cities

(where ' ' above contains a tab character). The file seems to be importing fine, but some non-ASCII chars get corrupted, especially at end of strings, and replaced with question marks.

no           Newcastle         1                NULL         NULL          NULL      
uk           Ньюкасл    1                NULL         NULL          NULL      
ja           ニューカッ?  1                NULL         NULL          NULL   

The corruption occurs at import. I tried using PRAGMA encoding = "UTF-8"; before importing, but it doesn't help. Any ideas?