Despite the secrecy surrounding the working conditions of the European staff, problems began to filter. In November 2000, the Prewitt Organizing Fund and the French union SUD-PTT Loire Atlantique launched an awareness campaign among the employees of Amazon France, after meeting with a group of 50 employees in the distribution center of Boigny-sur-Bionne. In a statement following the meeting, SUD-PTT denounced "degraded working conditions, flexible schedules, short-term labor contracts in periods of flux, low wages, and minimal social guarantees". Similar action was conducted in Germany and in U.K. Patrick Moran, head of the Prewitt Organizing Fund, founded an employee organization under the name of Alliance of New Economy Workers. In response, Amazon sent internal memos to its employees, stressing the pointlessness of unions within the company. At the end of January 2001, Amazon, which employed 1,800 people in Europe, announced a 15% reduction of its European staff. It also closed its customer service center in The Hague (Netherlands). Its 240 employees were offered to work in one of the two other European customer service centers, in Slough (United Kingdom) and in Regensberg (Germany). = Amazon worldwide The second group of foreign clients - after European customers - was in Japan. In July 2000, during an international symposium on information technology in Tokyo, Jeff Bezos announced his intention to launch Amazon Japan in the near future. He insisted on the high potential of the Japanese market, with expensive real estate affecting the prices of goods and services and, as a result, online shopping being more convenient than traditional shopping. High population density would mean easy and cheap home deliveries. A Japanese call center opened in August 2000 in Sapporo, a city on the Hokkaido island. Amazon Japan opened three months later, in November 2000, as the fourth subsidiary of Amazon and first non-European subsidiary, with a catalog of 1.1 million titles in Japanese and 600,000 titles in English. To reduce delivery times to 24 to 48 hours instead of six weeks for books published in the U.S., a large distribution center (15,800 m2) was created in Ichikawa, a town in the east of Tokyo. In November 2000, Amazon had 7,500 employees, a catalog of 28 million items, and 23 million clients worldwide. It opened its digital library with 1,000 ebooks, and the promise of many more titles for soon. Amazon also began focusing on the French-language market in Canada. It hired staff knowing the language and the market, to be able to offer French-language books, music and films (VHS and DVD) in a Canadian subsidiary. Amazon Canada, the fifth subsidiary of the company, was finally launched in June 2002 with a bilingual (English, French) website.