61110 At the same time, temples and shrines nationwide were filled with people paying the first visit of the year.
61111 The Sumiyoshi Shrine in Sumiyoshi-ku, Osaka City, which gets heavily crowded every year on the New Year's Day, was filled with visitors that rushed in after a long wait as the gate was opened at 10:00 p.m., December 31.
61112 As of midnight, the number of visitors to Sumiyoshi Shrine was counted to be at around 67,000, 38,000 less than in the previous year.
61113 At around 3:50 p.m., December 31, Jiro Kato, a waste recycler from Kawabe-cho, Higashi-kujo, Minami-ku of Kyoto City, dialed the emergency number to report, "A glass doll case in the living room on the first floor of my house is broken, and there is a crater in the wall that seems like a bullet hole."
61114 The Kujo Police Station found three bullet holes in all, the one in the living room, shot through the shutter and glass window to lodge in the wall; one in the eaves of the second-floor roof; and another on the outer wall.
61115 The bullets have not been discovered.
61116 The Station is investigating the incident as a gun firing case.
61117 Kato's wife, Kikuko, said, "I heard a banging noise as made by a falling object between two and three o'clock a.m.," and the police are investigating the relationship between her story and the incident.
61118 A cycling group comprising teachers and company workers, "Hyogo Ishikoro Association," plans to travel by bicycle about 200 kilometers from Pyongyang, the capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, across the border and northward to Tantung, China, in August this year.
61119 The DPRK is examining measures to open its doors, including a plan to hold an event this April with invited pro wrestlers and boxers, but it is the first time for the nation to admit foreigners to travel by bike in its territory.
61120 The Association led by Hironori Koike, Chairman and former high school teacher from Chuo-ku, Kobe, first cycled between Nanjing and Yangzhou in the summer of 1980, and has held a long-distance cycling tour in China every summer since then; in the summer of 1992, they traveled through the 4,000 kilometers of the Silk Road.
61121 They have thus contributed to the exchange between Japan and China through cycling.
61122 The North Korea cycling slated for this summer is in this movement of continental cycling tours, and the association consulted the DPRK government for the tour through a source related to the Japan Socialist Party.
61123 The Chinese government also recommended the plan to Pyongyang, based on their past achievements in China, and the Hyogo office of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, located in Kobe, joined the campaign as well.
61124 As North Korea had also requested an exchange project of a JSP source at about the same time, the nation's government is positive toward the acceptance of the plan, and is now working on the details.