Part I contains summary material from each of the sections of Part II and is organized in a similar way. It omits details, tables, etc., and is given below for public access. In Japan this still leaves a considerable effort from both industry and government, which will be reviewed in this report. It must also be noted that in some areas there have been significant advances and 1996 has seen the launch of several products utilizing these HTS ceramics. Today, possible applications encompass practically every industrial sector, from miniature electronic devices to supercomputers, from levitating trains to power generation.
Japan has a long history in superconductivity research.
Also, since 1981 there was also a project to find HTS materials lead by Professor Tanaka's group at Tokyo University. The Japanese government was not too far behind. Within a year it had launched two new interdisciplinary research programs in the subject, the International Superconductivity Technology Center and STA's Multi-core project, and several other development projects focusing on particular applications. The 1996 budgets for all superconductivity related projects supported by Japanese Ministries and agencies are shown in Table 1. Currently it has 103 member companies with 41 as special members, with Dupont being the only foreign special member, and 62 as ordinary members, with 10 foreign ordinary members.