Japan opened up under .jp in I believe 2001 and retained the existing second 
levels as well. Canada opened up .ca in around 2003.

On Thursday 08 June 2006 14:19, Edwin Groothuis wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 01:30:13PM +1000, Vic Cinc wrote:
> > > Can you name me one country, besides the .us domain which smarty
> > > chose state.us, which moved from a similar naming system as there
> > > is in Japan, the UK, Australia, Korea etc to a toplevel one?
> >
> > france, italy, germany come to mind, there are plenty of others I am
> > sure.
>
> That is funny...
>
> Take a random dutch company I was part of the DNS team of...
>
> 	philips.it		created:     before 19960129
> 	philips.de		first usenet posting 1991
> 	philips.fr		first usenet posting 1993
>
> Sorry, these ones didn't have 2nd level domains. They had "strange"
> rules (like having your DNS servers in the country of origin). You
> still owe me at least one which did.
>
> Edwin