bill - 8:56 am on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

So then is the progression: leaving the "category" search as the default, and then switching over to "page" as the default in a few months?

Not sure about that. Yahoo Japan has a bit of autonomy. They've followed the .com pattern with other areas but haven't shown much inclination to change this area. Maybe they're still making a good profit on the directory listings. You would think that this would be a great time to switch over to new SERPs if they were going to do so.

english translation of the official press release

I've looked around to see if anything has showed up in the English press, but haven't seen anything yet. Since this thread is on the front page now there's bound to be a news agency that will pick it up. You could make use of any number of online machine translation services for free if you just want the gist of the release. AltaVista's Babel comes to mind...