Back in July, ICANN announced its plan to begin offering TLDs in different letters and characters other than Alphabet in 2010. The plan includes Japanese characters, which makes domains such as “.Japan” (see above) and “.Tokyo” (see below) possible.

Since then, several organizations such as Internet Associations in Japan have been discussing to set up Japanese Internet Domain Name Conference. The conference is now officially working with 16 organizations including Japan Lawyers Associations, TCA and Ministry of Internal Affairs. The main purpose of the conference is to set the regulations and standards for new Japanese ccTLD related issues, and to select contractors in Japan.

Currently available ccTLDs such as