It's time for a showdown.
The final round of a Japanese word processor war may be beginning, as Microsoft Corp. releases a new version March 12 of its Japanese Word series, Word 98, accompanied with its latest kana-kanji conversion engine MS-IME 98.
Justsystem Corp., virtually Japan's only major personal computer software maker, has long retained its top position with its ATOK kana-kanji conversion engine and the Ichitaro word processor series, despite recent challenges from Microsoft. For Japanese, whose writing system is among the most complicated in the world, an efficient kana-kanji conversion engine is essential for computer users.