The first Japanese FASTUS was the MUC-5 Joint Venture system developed in 1993. Both the English and Japanese MUC-5 FASTUS systems used a graphical user interface called Grasper for rule definition, and recognized tie-up relationships among company organizations [1]. The performance of the Japanese FASTUS, together with other Japanese systems, demonstrated that the basic information extraction (IE) technology was portable to a language very different from English. The MUC-5 Japanese FASTUS gave us experience with 2-byte character input and JUMAN, a morphological analyzer developed at Kyoto University. The second Japanese FASTUS, called MIMI (for "ears" in Japanese), summarized spontaneous human-human dialogues, and was developed during 1993-1995. MIMI was also Grasper-based, but its input was ASCII character "romaji" with spaces between words, and it had a 3,000-word dictionary in the domain of conference room scheduling [4, 5, 6]. During 1994-1995, the English FASTUS infrastructure underwent a number of changes, the most significant of which was the transition from Grasper to a declarative pattern specification language called FastSpec. FastSpec enables a fast cycle of rule specification, compilation, and testing during development [21. *MET FASTUS was developed under SRI IR&D support.