Japan's patent office parent, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, announced the measures yesterday.

The Japanese patent office (JPO) is scheduled to recruit 150 new examiners in an attempt to ramp the number of patents examined from 240,000 per year to 290,000. The U.S. patent office (USPTO), by comparison, examined about 300,000 patents last year (USPTO annual report coverage).

JPO is outsourcing some prior art search to assist in that area of examination. JPO will also be upgrading its ability to electronically process and examine applications filed online. The USPTO has done well in the area of online examination, and is currently working on improving electronic filing.

Pendency in JPO is at 26 months to first office action, compared to 20 months at the USPTO.

JPO will also ask companies to limit patent applications to those that could have global impact. That such a suggestion would be treated as reasonable and responded to somewhat appropriately speaks to the relative cohesiveness that Japanese society still retains at some levels, a far cry from the wild west mentality rampant here in the U.S.A.

Japan within the past year has established a court dedicated to handling intellectual property disputes, modeled upon the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals (CAFC). A dedicated IP court, replacing the first-run district court melee, is something the U.S. sorely needs to reduce litigation cost and provide consistency, avoiding the current fandango of venue shopping, such as the plaintiff preference for the increasingly overwhelmed districts of East Texas and East Virginia, headed by folks who know how to run a rocket docket.

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The Rising Sun flag was used in Japan as early as the 14th century, and more recently by the Japanese Navy, up to the end of World War II. The flag has thus been considered an emblem of Japanese militarism, especially by its prickly neighbors, China and Korea, both formerly occupied by Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s. The present Japanese national flag is shorn of its beams.

Japan, after a prolonged economic slump (of around 15 years), seems to be reviving itself economically, and perhaps a bit politically.