This paper presents a new research and development project called Papillon [Planas00]. It is a French-Japanese cooperation between laboratories GETA/CLIPS (Grenoble, France) and NII (Tokyo, Japan). Its goal is to build a French-English-Japanese multilingual lexical database by using interlingual links and to extract from it digital bilingual French-Japanese and Japanese-French dictionaries. These dictionaries will be available under the terms of an open source license. This project, initiated by some computational linguists, aims at being useful and open to all those who are interested in Japanese and French. A seminar was organized on the 10-12 of August 2000 in Tokyo [Planas00]. It was devoted to discussions aiming at reaching a general consensus on the structure and content of the database, and to decide some technical aspects of database development, i.e. database configuration, contents of the entries and link between the entries. Introduction There are few French-Japanese usa...