Thanks for the answer CoreyC,
Seems like the problem was somewhat deeper.
Originally, I had to install japanese fonts eplicitly and I just put monafont.ttf file to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/font/... and after restarting the X, everything just worked.
Seems like xft is a way smarter than old-style font support, so in absense of it I had to roll back to use old .pcf fonts, again
http://monafont.sourceforge.net was a great help - after geting the files right and extending font path, everything worked.
But I still wonder if it's possible to use True Type fonts without xft and any additional packages...
Cheers