60669 The time was 9:00 a.m., and the temperature was six degrees Centigrade.
60670 The Naritasan temple saw 3,500 people paying on the first visit of the year.
60671 The Emperor ate soldiers' food for field battle, which was one of the New Year's ceremony events.
60672 The year 1994 is over, filled with bleak trends and incidents including a lack of jobs, unemployed middle-aged people, and bullying-triggered suicide.
60673 On the night of December 31, approaches to temples and shrines nationwide were jam-packed with people who could not wait until New Year's Day to pay the year's first visit.
60674 The precinct of Meiji Shrine was full of visitors after 10:00 p.m.
60675 About 90,000 people lined up in the cold north wind, and rushed to the shrine altar on the drum sign of 0:00, January 1, throwing money offerings over other visitors' heads into the collection box.
60676 Mr. Manabu Maeshima, a company worker from Edogawa-ku, Tokyo, said with powerful religious handclaps, "I do not mean to be greedy, but I hope that the economic situation will improve.I prayed that four families including two children would not be bad-off."
60677 The Meiji Shrine expects about 3,550,000 visitors, almost the same number as last year, over the first three days of the New Year.
60678 Around 9:43 p.m., December 31, an earthquake jolted Okushiri, Hiyama of Hokkaido, recording an intensity of three on the Richter scale.
60679 According to the observation of the Sapporo District Meteorological Observatory, the epicenter was southwest off Hokkaido, and approximately 10 kilometers deep.
60680 The Okushiri town hall announced that it was not a major quake, and no serious confusion occurred.
60681 Concerning the murder case of Mari Uehara, the eldest daughter of Atsushi Uehara, a company employee from Anesaki, Ichihara of Chiba, the ad hoc task force comprising the homicide section of Chiba Prefectural Police and the Ichihara Police Station arrested on the evening of December 31 Toru Uehara, a bookseller and Mari's uncle and cohabiter, on charges of her murder and abandonment of her body, following the preceding arrest on suspicion of kidnapping her, a minor, on the previous day.
60682 According to the police investigation, the suspect picked up Mari, who came back from a friend's home in neighborhood, with a light sedan in front of their home around 5:10 p.m., December 28, drove her about three kilometers to the south, and let her out of the car in the precincts of an industrial water treatment plant in Daijuku, Sodegaura of Chiba (belongs to Prefectural Corporation Agency), strangled her to death, and abandoned her body in a bamboo forest nearby.