diff --git a/pelican/tools/pelican_import.py b/pelican/tools/pelican_import.py
index 30d6346c..27e47754 100755
--- a/pelican/tools/pelican_import.py
+++ b/pelican/tools/pelican_import.py
@@ -603,8 +603,18 @@ def download_attachments(output_path, urls):
                     .format(url, e))
             logger.warning(error)
         except IOError as e: #Python 2.7 throws an IOError rather Than URLError
-            error = ("No file could be downloaded from {}; Error {}"
-                    .format(url, e))
+            # For japanese, the error might look kind of like this:
+            # e = IOError( 'socket error', socket.error(111, u'\u63a5\u7d9a\u3092\u62d2\u5426\u3055\u308c\u307e\u3057\u305f') )
+            # and not be suitable to use in "{}".format(e) , raising UnicodeDecodeError
+            # (This is at least the case on my Fedora running Python 2.7.5 
+            # (default, Feb 19 2014, 13:47:28) [GCC 4.8.2 20131212 (Red Hat 4.8.2-7)] on linux2
+            try:
+                error = ("No file could be downloaded from {}; Error {}"
+                        .format(url, e))
+            except UnicodeDecodeError:
+                # For lack of a better log message because we could not decode e, let's use repr(e)
+                error = ("No file could be downloaded from {}; Error {}"
+                        .format(url, repr(e)))
             logger.warning(error)
     return locations