While trademark law resides a bit afar from my usual "sandboxes," a recent paper in this area accompanies the release of a related open-access dataset. In the paper, The Japan Trademarks Dataset: An Open-access Resource, Jeremy Sheff (St. John's) emphasizes how building such datasets, along with making them open-access, "is thus crucial to ensuring the continued progress of our understanding of trademarks and their operation in the world."
To this end, the Japan Trademarks Dataset (link here) includes "all data preserved by the Japan Patent Office on trademark applications, registrations, and administrative proceedings (including data on parties, examiners, prosecution history events, and interactions with the international trademark system) from the inception of Japan’s trademark system in the late 19th century through September 25, 2019."
While the release of such a dataset is notable, this particular dataset is especially notable in that it "not only adds to the limited number of comprehensive research datasets on trademarks currently available to researchers, it represents the first such dataset on the trademark system of a non-Western country. The public release of the Japan Trademarks Dataset thus presents a unique opportunity to engage in comparative analysis and evaluation of the international dynamics of the trademark system beyond the limits of familiar Anglophone and European systems." The abstract follows.
“This Article discloses a new comprehensive dataset on the trademark registration system of Japan. The dataset includes all data preserved by the Japan Patent Office on applications, registrations, and administrative proceedings (including data on parties, examiners, prosecution history events, and interactions with the international trademark system) from the inception of Japan’s trademark system in the late 19th century through September 25, 2019. The Japan Trademarks Dataset–the first of its kind on the trademark system of an Asian country–is being made available on open access terms. This Article concludes with several demonstrative descriptive analyses illustrating the types of uses to which this new data resource may be put."