Hyams also visited Japan at that time, and in 1960 signed a contract with Nihon Gijutsu Boeki (NGB) for exclusive sales in the Far East, gaining sales and customer support to major Japanese companies. At that time, Japanese business representatives started subscribing to Derwent's Farmdoc, but needed considerable support to understand and use the nature of the system and materials. The agency NGB played a major role. Japan's high-growth period was a period of rapid adoption of technology by companies, and the importance of knowing the strength and rights of patents related to the technology to be introduced was emphasized in corporate planning.

Hyams held Derwent user meetings in the United States, Europe and Japan, with the first member meeting held in Tokyo in 1965 (see photo). In Japan, the users themselves formed User Groups, and conducted training to improve their search technology as a unique activity, and presented proposals for expanding the database.

According to the Japan Farmdoc Association (JFA), Mr. Ikuo Yoshida examined the quality of the data and set up a company code improvement proposal committee (1975) to investigate the situation, as a result of which they asked Derwent to correct the transliteration, not the English translation. Members of the JFA also checked for omissions in the Japanese patents and that they applied to Derwent for a survey of that situation.

Mr. Nozomi Otsuki gave a detailed report on NGB's business development of Derwent product services in Japan. The agency relationship between NGB and Derwent lasted until 2002. In 1976, DWPI was installed on SDC- ORBIT, and online availability began. After that, it was installed in STN, DIALOG, and QUESTEL, and NGB provided training on online databases. DWPI has expanded its coverage every year. The subjects of the course were to correctly understand the expansion of the technical field and the countries in which the data was collected, and to search online. There are many other search codes and search technologies, so study sessions to improve search technology were frequently held at user meetings.

Peter Hyams adds: In correspondence with the author, I wrote: "When my father first travelled to Japan, in 1962, the journey took over 24 hours, as the route involved stops in Tehran, Delhi, Hong Kong etc. He continued to make those journeys because his Japanese clients were professionally important to him. But he also enjoyed his visits and always spoke well of the welcome he had received and the way he was treated. Looking back on his Derwent career, and his many travels on business, I would say he had particularly warm memories of Japan." .

The gist of that concludes Ms Tanahashi's article. It was written for “Pharmaceutical Library Bulletin”, the membership publication of JPLA, the Japan Pharmaceutical Library Association, whose members work at 40-plus company libraries and 70-plus academic ones.http://www.yakutokyo.jp/en