The just recently released jikes-1.13 contains among other things the proper solution to #19647.The releasenotes on http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/project/shownotes.php?release_id=81 indicates that this release is a mostly bugfix release and lots of issues are taken care of. Please update :)
This was added a couple of days ago.
Unfortunately, this rawhide version does have another -encoding Problem: jikes-1.12 from wolverine does the job, but the 1-13-1 version stops with "Charset conversion error at offset 0: Argument list too long" Take care Andreas