Uchikura & Co., LLC

KanjiWORD is a software developed by PSPINC (Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.) back in the early 1990s. It was one of the company’s earliest and most successful products, designed to enable Japanese word processing on English-language (non-Japanese) operating systems, such as MS-DOS and early versions of Windows.

 

Here’s a bit of background and context:

 

🖥️ What KanjiWORD Did
KanjiWORD allowed users to read, write, and print Japanese text on computers that weren’t originally built for Japanese input. At the time, Japanese-capable PCs were expensive and region-specific, so KanjiWORD made it possible for English PCs in the U.S. to handle double-byte Japanese characters (kanji, hiragana, katakana).

 

🌏 Why It Was Important
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, bilingual computing was rare. PSPINC’s expertise in double-byte language processing(the handling of Japanese and other Asian scripts) made KanjiWORD a breakthrough tool for businesses, students, and government agencies that needed cross-language communication between Japan and the U.S.

 

🧩 Technical Legacy
KanjiWORD laid the groundwork for PSPINC’s later bilingual products — including Dreamersi, WebdeXpress, and NewsMAIL — all of which carry on the same mission: connecting Japan and the U.S. through software that works seamlessly in both languages.