Beginnings JustSystems was founded in July 1979 by and Kazunori Ukigawa, and was incorporated in June 1981. Kazunori worked at a subsidiary company of
Toshiba, and he was interested in Japanese-language computing. Toshiba released in February 1979, the first word processor for the Japanese language, but it sold less than their business computers. He founded the company as a dealer of business computers, and they started selling Japanese language software. After the release of
PC-8801, they developed an invoicing software for it, which printed out estimations and invoices in Japanese. They demonstrated it at trade fairs, and received a positive response. The jX-WORD for the
IBM JX was released and in 1985, jX-WORD Taro was released for PC-9801. jX-WORD Taro was priced at ¥58,000, which was the middle price among Japanese word processor software, and sold 9,700 copies.
Domination in Japan PC market The same year, Ichitaro was released as its definite successor. Ichitaro's system disk contained
ATOK 4 and a runtime version of
MS-DOS 2.11. It allowed users to use other MS-DOS applications with Japanese language support. The first version of Ichitaro has shipped 29,000 copies. Ichitaro Ver.2 has shipped 80,000 copies. Ichitaro Ver.3 was the first version ported for other Japanese DOS platforms. It has shipped more than 300,000 copies until 1991. Total shipments of Ichitaro reached one million in November 1991. ATOK 7 was bundled with Ichitaro 4, and was available as a standalone product in 1992.
Arrival of Microsoft Word Microsoft released the first Japanese version of
Microsoft Word for Windows in 1991. Four years passed before Ichitaro 5 was released for Japanese DOS platforms in April 1993. The next month, Microsoft released the Japanese
Windows 3.1 and the first Japanese version of
Microsoft Office, which included Word 5.0 and
Excel 4.0. Its successors shipped 200,000 copies per month in late 1994. JustSystems barely completed a Windows adaptation of Ichitaro in December 1993, but Microsoft took over the market dominated by Ichitaro and
Lotus 1-2-3. As of 1997, a Japanese media website reported that 64% of readers using Microsoft Word, and the main reason was that they used it in offices and schools. The rest of 35% were using Ichitaro, and the main reason was that the IME of ATOK was convenient. In 1998, the
Japan Fair Trade Commission informed Microsoft of an
unfair trade that they forced personal computer manufacturers to bundle with Excel and Word against the request of a bundle with Excel and Ichitaro. Ichitaro Ver.5 was ported to the
Macintosh and to
OS/2. In May 2003, the release of a
Linux version was announced. Compact versions, "Ichitaro dash" and "Ichitaro lite" are produced for
laptop PCs. As
office suite, "Just home" is also available. "Ichitaro smile" is targeted at elementary school students and "Ichitaro jump" at middle and high school students. On 1 February 2005, sales and production of the software were frozen pending an appeal by the company against a ruling of the
Tokyo District Court which states that there is a
breach of a patent owned by
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. However, on 30 September 2005,
Intellectual Property High Court of Japan, which was newly formed in April 2005, has granted JustSystems’ appeal. Because this judgement became a final decision in October 2005, the original decision sentenced by the Tokyo District Court was overturned. In 2009, JustSystems became a subsidiary company of
Keyence. In the 2010s, they focus on
correspondence education and
enterprise software although Ichitaro and ATOK continue to be developed. ==Versions==