In [13]: sf = shapefile.Reader('/home/akira/tmp/NLNI/Rivers/W05-09_01_GML/W05-09_01-g_Stream.shp', encoding='shift-jis')
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-13-9cb378269942> in <module>()
----> 1 sf = shapefile.Reader('/home/akira/tmp/NLNI/Rivers/W05-09_01_GML/W05-09_01-g_Stream.shp', encoding='shift-jis')

/home/akira/src/python/pyshp/shapefile.pyc in __init__(self, *args, **kwargs)
    320         if len(args) > 0:
    321             if is_string(args[0]):
--> 322                 self.load(args[0])
    323                 return
    324         if "shp" in kwargs.keys():

/home/akira/src/python/pyshp/shapefile.pyc in load(self, shapefile)
    379             self.__shpHeader()
    380         if self.dbf:
--> 381             self.__dbfHeader()
    382
    383     def __del__(self):

/home/akira/src/python/pyshp/shapefile.pyc in __dbfHeader(self)
    575                 idx = len(fieldDesc[name]) - 1
    576             fieldDesc[name] = fieldDesc[name][:idx]
--> 577             fieldDesc[name] = u(fieldDesc[name], "ascii")
    578             fieldDesc[name] = fieldDesc[name].lstrip()
    579             fieldDesc[1] = u(fieldDesc[1], "ascii")

/home/akira/src/python/pyshp/shapefile.pyc in u(v, encoding, encodingErrors)
     94         if isinstance(v, bytes):
     95             # For python 2 decode bytes to unicode.
---> 96             return v.decode(encoding, encodingErrors)
     97         elif isinstance(v, unicode):
     98             # Already unicode.

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x90 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)