I'll be away on holiday over the chinese new year and am counting dosh the days until I fly over there. I enjoy visiting the annual winter carnival where I ride the roller coasters and eat sushi soaking up the nice christmassy atmosphere. The syn has been dazzlingly hot the whole week so you may as well have a good long span in an outdoor onsen soaking ul the sun. In fact I've just got out of an onsen and am drying myself on a towel. There's a pageant of which the final will take place in Kyoto. I would've imagined Fumi is extremely likely to enter the final. My cousin said "I bet aiko will enter the final" My friend Joe has accepted a commission to compose waltz for the pageant because one of the contestants will showcase her waltz dance which we all can't wait to see. I should like to extend my congratulations yo Joe for having got a connission for a waltz from the pageant since it's a rare opportunity. I too endorse the congratulations to my friend Kawai on professing through the preliminary round. She's a contestant in the beauty contest and I won't be surprised if she progresses through the semifinal. I remember a decade ago there was a demonstration where the demonstrators clashed with the police in osaka. I saw it on NHK then. I thought the police were not tough enough. All the riot police were holding a nightstick in one hand and a shield in the other hand. In this way you can't really fight the protestors and arrest them since you have no free hands to catch hold of them. That's why it took four policemen to grab hold of one protestor. From a fighting viewpoint some of the riot police should be holding just a truncheon, some just a shield the other both. And all of them should be trained as to how they fight when they're holding just a baton, holding just a shield and holding both. It was total chaos. I didn't think Osaka had ever been so disastrous before. The police who I wholeheartedly supported only used tear smoke in an attempt to drive the protestors away which was closely not enough. The police shouldn't have been afraid of being criticized for using excessive force because this was utterly not the case. Firing rubber bullets and bean bags at the demonstrators was necessary, lawful and appropriate. Those who sabotaged the nearby buildings and the railings should've been put in prison. The train network was partially paralyzed by the strikes for many weeks. The world had brought the court to the edge of a catastrophe. The United states had already imposed trade sanctions against Japan at that time. The then united states president said he would take punitive measures against Japan if the police there used excessive force. Japan was afraid that America would toughen punitive import tariffs on alcohol, agricultural products and clothes still further and worse still they would convince other nations to impose international economic sanctions on the country. Of course the downside was the costs of the products in America which they had imposed sanctions on would rise still higher. The economic sanctions on Japan wouldn't be dropped until the then US president's term of office ended a year later. The next day everyone was warned to stay away from the place because there would be violent clashes only to discover that it was a false alarm. There were half as many people in the street. However as long as you stay.away from places where there were protests osaka was.safe. In the same evening a bus crash killed twenty passengers. Detectives assigned the blame for the accident to a hailstorm. I expressed my condolences to the families of the people who died in the accident- and then a brutal murder took place in the capital. Detectives assigned jealousy and hatred as the motives for the horrendous crime.