After over five years of actively collecting a wide variety of documents and texts related to regulated medicinal products in Japan, Jouhou Koukai has decided to open a reading room where visitors to our site can have access to the collections. At present the JKS collections comprise of nearly 120,000 individual texts, scanned documents, photographs, voice records, off-line web sites and other resources, predominately in Japanese.

The collections cover diversified topics gravitating around issues of pharmaceuticals, (drugs, biologicals), quasi-drugs, medical devices, cosmetics as regulated medicinal products in Japan. To certain extend, documents relevant to the entire life science industry and business climate in Japan shall also be included here.

In the Reading room we will start opening to a wider audience the text and media files available in English or presented bilingually. In further gathering English-language documents, we expect to be facilitated by the major new initiative of the Japanese Government to provide centralized, single-source non-commercial translation of the contemporary laws of Japan.

The materials included here are not arranged chronologically, although they span more than a decade back. Some of the older documents are not invalidated or may represent historical or scientific interest. While some of the documents may still be available from other public sources elsewhere, we believe that by assembling and annotating here a considerable added value shall be provided to all of JKS customers, users and visitors.

Inquiries related to the documents included in the Reading room could be sent to the email address below.

Sincerely,

Reading room Team

March 1, 2007, Tokyo

reading_room(at)jouhoukoukai.com