OVERVIEW OF AMIGA (JAPANESE DISTRIBUTED VERSION)
 
	Commodore Japan Corp. of Tokyo, a subsidary of Commodore Business 
Machines, has been distributing the NTSC version Amiga's for past 4-5 
years.  Starting from Amiga 1000, the current models such as A1200/4000's 
are also officially sold here.
 
HOW MANY AMIGA's ARE INSTALLED HERE IN JAPAN??
 
	Currently there are less than 10,000 Amiga's installed in Japan.
Apple Computers has marked over 500,000 units of Mac-shipment here, and
they have 8% of the current pie, so you know how Amiga numbers stand.
Half the Amiga users here are mainly directed in playing games, and other 
half use them as a low-cost solution to create Computer Graphics animations.
 
IS AMIGA DYING IN JAPAN??
 
	No, quite the opposite. Since the introductions of Amiga 2000 and
VideoToaster from NewTek,Inc. of U.S., the numbers have been improving with
an unbelievable rate. Some volunteering work done from its local users gave
birth to Kanji-enabled systems, such as LKS and ANS.(ANS is now officially
bundled with all Amiga CPU's sold in Japan. You can obtain it separately
for less than $200 US.) There are numbers of Sharewares and Freewares, 
including text/graphics converters to Japanese computers, terminal software,
and 2-byte-coded GnuEmacs, etc. 
 
HOW ARE KANJI CHARACTERS HANDLED ON AMIGA??
 
       Every Amiga CPU distributed here is bundled with a Japanese system 
called ANS 1.2 (Amiga Nihongo System).  It was originally developed by 
Mr. Obayashi of TECHNODE, Ltd. and is now marketed by MIQ Japan, Inc.
       
       The ANS package is a 2-Disk set of small programs, composed by 
JOUTPUT (The main code translation program), JINPUT (Romaji input 
module for U.S. keyboards) and some Kanji-enabled utilities. Supported 
utilities include PCJ (XPK-compatible terminal software), EUC2SJIS/SJIS2EUC
converters, Workbench Menu customize script, XED-Mini(AREXX-compatible 
text editor), Kanji fonts, JIS-printer drivers and dictionary files. All 
of them run over AmigaDOS as independent tasks. The operation booklet is 
poor, and it is written in Japanese.
 
	The ANS uses its original bitmapped fonts m12 & m24, and when used
on XED-Mini you can either save the file as IFF graphics format or JIS code
text format. The quality of those jaggy Kanji fonts are way-behind those 
PostScript fonts supported on Macs, but other than that it works just fine.
Like those in Unix workstations, the ANS uses EUC code as standard.
 
	To obtain ANS 1.2, contacts should be made to:
 
			MIQ Japan, Inc.
			SIT Nishi-Shinjuku Building.
			4-7-1 Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku
                        Tokyo 160, Japan
                        Phone :+81-03-3299-7377
                        Fax:+81-03-3299-7371 
 
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