Aizuwakamatsu shi (city) is the center of western region of Fukushima ken (prefecture), and its economic sphere's population is about 190,000.
On May 28th,
Mayor Ichiro Kanke announced the city government will introduce OpenOffice.org into all its offices. They are planning to switch their office software from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org on 850 PCs in their government offices, and to cut the cost about 15,000,000 yen over 5 years.
The Mayor said that they can not only cut the cost but also accommodate the long-term preservation of their documents.
"We often met problmes with the latest office software to open and read our documents created in the past. But now we can use the international standard file format, ODF, so that we will be able to use and preserve our documents over many years."
"It happened that our citizens had to buy the office software when they receive documents from the city government."
"ODF, which can be used from the free software, OpenOffice.org, will help reduce the burden on our citizens," he said.
Now
their Home page announces "We introduces ODF and OpenOffice.org" and "it can be downloaded from
OpenOffice.org Japanese Native Language Project."
When you come to Japan,
don't forget to visit Aizuwakamatsu city :)
