I don't know if you've been following the bird flu scare, but it has come to Japan. There were several cases which were caught early, but then a couple weeks ago they discovered that a farm in Kyoto prefecture had been hiding the bird flu. 150,000 birds had died of the flu, but they kept on selling the chickens to the processing plants. After an investigation was started, the head of the company that owns the farm and his wife committed suicide. It hasn't seemed to cause a huge shakeup in chicken and egg consumption, however. I find this really strange, because as soon as the U.S. was found to have cases of a less virulent strain of bird flu, Japan immediately banned all chicken imports from the U.S. Now that Japan has been found to have a huge case of deadly bird flu, not much is happening. Apparently some crows have also tested positive for the flu in Kyoto, which isn't good. There are tons of crows here and they could spread the flu like crazy.