I wouldn't think there's anything wrong with your application. Tapestry does everything in UTF-8 by default; that wiki page is fairly out of date (referring to the 5.0.5 beta, where apparently forms with file uploads still didn't use UTF-8 properly).
You're saying you don't have the problem locally. Have you tried running on a different server? If you do not have the problem there, there's probably something wrong with the codepage settings of the operating system on the server.
Purely anecdotal evidence below
I have once had a similar character set problem in a Tapestry 5 app on the production server (running SUSE Linux) that I could not reproduce on any other server. All seemed fine with the application, the Tomcat server, and the codepage settings of the system, but POST data would end up decoded as ISO 8859-1 instead of UTF-8 in the application. The app had run on that server for a year before the problem manifested - maybe through an update in the operating system.
Afer a day of not getting anywhere, we ended up just re-installing the whole server OS, and everything was fine again.