Column: 2005 Update.

The season has come again this year.
There's a new word invented again, "Love NEET" means those who fears to love an opposite sex or don't know how to love.

Akihabara story.
And these Love NEET's are easily found here in "Akiba".

Train Man.
This novel made Akiba much popular as a tourist spot. So many "first time comers" or "layman" came, and Akiba-otaku's deplore that the town is diluted.

Departure of Tsukuba Express.
Is Tsukuba Express the cause of dilution in Akiba? Maybe.

Subway in Tokyo.
The 13th line is under construction, and will be operational in 2007.

About the train accident in Japan.
People died was miscalculated: it was 107.
JapanRail West, the company which operated the said line, is still floundering.

Disasters.
There's one good news here, that Indonesia government and Free Aceh Movement or GAM (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) had reached an agreement on peace negotiation.
India and Pakistan also show some indications about peace in Kashmir.
It's good to hear that they stopped fighting against each other, and cooperate in terms of reconstruction.

Dependence on medicine.
This winter, flu will be prevalent.
Remember to wash hands and to gargle, these are always the best ways of prevention.

Pollens as the cause of allergy.
Scientific analysis says that this year won't be bad as much as last year.
But still be careful for the people who have hay fever; whether the amount of pollens is lessen or not, you still have an allergy.

Save the Earth from short sleeves.
"Cool-Biz" campaign was successful.
Of course in terms of amount of energy saved, especially since the summer on 2005 was really hot.
But there's another aspect that it had spread and increased the Ecology-consciousness to many Japanese.

Team -6%.
Many private companies (especially in cars and electric appliances) also tell about these policies, in somewhere like TV commercials.

Vote! (of course in Japan)
Finally Koizumi and LDP won in a landslide.
It made the bills to be approved so quickly.

Privatize.
Postal service privatization bill was approved too easily after the election.

The falling nation.
Birthrate of Japan had dropped to 1.26, which is lowest in all the advanced nations ever.
At the same time, population of Japan began decreasing for 10,000 this year.
Is this problem totally helpless?

Fear of asbestos.
There's more scary news about construction.
Japan has strict laws about earthquake-resistant construction, but it was detected that there are group of people who forged the computation about it, and amazingly it was permitted by an investigating organization.
Whoever the one responsible is, those apartments built is now forbidden and will be demolished soon.

To the next step...
It's quite long since negotiation between Toshiba and Sony had been broken off.
Both the "HD-DVD" and the "Blu-ray" will begin selling on 2006 Spring, but I'm not sure if consumers are still interested.
"Flash memory" is slowly but certainly becoming the new standard, and both of them might be kicked down after the long fruitless competition.

Too Much Belief to the computer.
Stock market is still active like crazy.

Repeated Fiasco.
After J-Com stocks resumed trading from 1,020,000 yen, it had risen up to 2,200,000 yen.
Now It's falling back to somewhere near 1,600,000 yen.
And there's an individual who had earned 2 Billion yen in this incident. (17 Million US Dollars!)

Baseball and Mass Media.
Baseball marked lowest audience ratings this year.