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A lot of Japanese websites are the same. All the navigation buttons are images for example, I found that quite a bad experience over slow wifi!

Having dealt with the Korean web (as a user) it was daunting.

Once had a customer who did the same. His reason at the time was that his customers see boxes otherwise. This was one of my first projects and I was still in school then. Didn't know anything about unicode, plus unicode was not that popular then.

I guess, may be your customer has the same problem.

Setting aside countless other obvious issues, converting text to images is a huge accessibility issue.

Lucky it's not based in the US, that's the sort of thing that gets you sued.

thats what you get in IE 6 society