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Japan's Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI) wants to spend two more years and a few more million dollars on its fifth generation computers. METI has already spent over 10 years and $400 million on the project. However, observers have not been all that impressed with the results, calling the machines slow and incompatible. Japanese scientists say the new effort will work on ways to link Japanese computers to Unix-based machines.

Even with the proposed $1.9 billion pumped into the High Performance Computing and Communications initiative, the U.S. will still have a hard time catching up to Japan where supercomputing is already used extensively in manufacturing and design. A report from the Gartner Group points out that Cray Research Inc., the principal U.S. supercomputer vendor, has annual revenues of less than $1 billion. In contrast, the three largest Japanese computer companies which are Fujitsui, Hitachi, and NEC have annual revenues ranging from $17 billion to $48 billion.

Scrutinizes the computer market's influence on Tron, The Real-Time Operating Nucleus developed by Ken Sakamura of Tokyo University. United States hostility and changes in Japanese computer industry have a negative influence on this personal computer; DynaBook by Toshiba is booming in the marketplace; Software is developed to get around the large number of Japanese characters.

Offers an overview of magazine articles about computers published in Japan, in October 1998. Includes `Nikkei Science's magazine's article on search engines; `Entre' magazine's columns on small office home office (SOHO); `SOHO Computing' magazine's articles on SOHO computers.

Presents charts and graphs related to the computer retail market in Japan. Market share for top-selling computers; Company sales; Market share for top selling word processor; Market share for top selling laser printer; Market share for top selling inkjet printers; Market share for top selling software.

Presents news briefs related to the computer industry in Japan, as of November 1998. Includes IBM's development of a `wearable' personal computer; Domestic computer shipments from January to June.

Presents news briefs related to computers and the computer industry in Japan, as of November 1998. Includes availability of American-version office and electronic supplies in Tokyo; Protection of desktop computers from earthquakes; Potential effects of the year 2000 date conversion problem.

Reports on a survey by Multimedia Research Institute which found an increase in computer and server sales in Japan during the first half of fiscal 1996. Breakdown of market share by company.

This article reports that Japan intends to build a supercomputer that will be 73 times faster than the current top computer. The current product, IBM Corp.'s Blue Gene, can handle 136.8 trillion floating-point operations per second, or TFLOPS. The Japanese education and science ministry plans to develop a machine that could operate at 10 PFLOPS, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second.