A few news articles & links for today:

• Japan’s population crisis: The number of Japanese 20-year-olds — the age from which people are legally considered adults — who saw in the start of 2007 is the lowest on record according to the MInistry of Internal Affairs. But perhaps there is hope: the number of babies born in Japan in 2006 is likely to have increased by 23,000 from a year earlier to 1.086 million, marking the first upturn in six years, according to estimates released Sunday.
• Did you send some X-mas cards out that said “Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year”? Hopefully you didn’t mail them from the Oji Post Office in Nara, where an official arbitrarily decided that 61 cards with such a message printed on them should be delivered on New Year’s Day.
• Prime Minister Shinzo Abe enjoyed watching “Letters from Iwo Jima” at a Tokyo movie theater on Sunday. A prime minister saying he liked a popular movie: aren’t you amazed?
• The Midnight Eye has an interesting article on the adult film industry in Japan.
• Japanese officials have denied reports that a joint U.S./Japanese military exercise held in November 2006 addressed a hypothetical Chinese military invasion of the Senkaku Islands.
• An 80-year-old man in Ibaraki celebrated the arrival of 2007 this morning by eating a mochi rice cake, choking on it, and dying. A 74-year-old man in Niigata also died today of similar causes.