A few quick links this morning:

• The video game industry in the land of the rising sun bounced back in 2006 putting up its biggest ever sales year with a total over 600 billion yen. This was driven in large part by the seemingly unstoppable Nintendo DS.
• Bird Flu kills more Chickens: The agriculture ministry announced Friday that about 2,400 chickens at a farm in Kiyotakecho, Miyazaki Prefecture, had died over the three days since Wednesday due to suspected high-pathogenic avian influenza.
• Japanese actor Shingo Mukai, who went missing in the port city of Cartagena on January 5, was found dead and buried a day later by the city as an unidentified person. Shingo, 31, was discovered in the water in the Caribbean city’s port area with his neck broken on January sixth.
• “I Just Didn’t Do It” (Soredemo Boku wa Yattenai), the first film directed by Masayuki Suo in over 10 years, made its world premiere at New York’s Japan Society on Thursday. The film takes a critical look at how Japanese courts deal with the societal problem of “chikan,” or men who use the anonymity of crowded trains to grope women.
• goo Rankings has published a summary of the top-linked sites for December 2006 from their blog service.
• An Iranian family of four ordered deported after a six-year battle with immigration authorities has been granted permission to stay one more month. The decision was made after the family members showed up at the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau on Friday, without any plane ticket home, to turn themselves in.
• Finally, a USB-powered paper shredder!
Evening Update:
• Comic Gumbo, Japan’s first ever free weekly manga magazine, will hit the streets next week, bolstered by the success of a growing number of handout magazines like R25 and Hot Pepper. Gumbo will have 230 pages, about half the number of popular manga books, with around 26 pages devoted to ads. It will also be available free online.
• Busted: A political group headed by education minister Bunmei Ibuki logged a combined 8.75 million yen in “office expenses” in 2004 and 2005, a period the group’s political funds report indicates it had little or no activity and had a rent-free office, it was learned Friday.
• Tsunami fears have eased in Japan after a massive 8.3-magnitude Pacific Ocean earthquake as only minor waves hit the country’s north and the United States cancelled its tidal wave alert.
• It has been revealed that the president and other executives of major confectioner Fujiya Co., which has suspended operations for using out-of-date milk to make cream puffs, did not announce the problem although they were aware of the problem last autumn.
• A MYSTERY samurai swordsman reportedly helped save two unarmed British cops as they tackled a vicious gang [via Mari].
• Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a parasitic chytrid fungus that kills more than 90% of amphibians that come into contact with it, has arrived in Tokyo and threatens to wipe out Japan’s frogs.