Abstract: This paper presents the UP Kuchibue and UP Nakayosi databases containing on-line handwritten Japanese characters. These databases are the international versions of two databases, Kuchibue and Nakayosi, collected in the Nakagawa Laboratory at the University of Agriculture & Technology in Tokyo. They contain more than 3 million characters written by 283 Japanese writers. UP Kuchibue and UP Nakayosi are stored in the common Unipen format. Unipen is a western plain ASCII format, which allows easy access for international researchers and facilitates international benchmarks.