- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday January 2 2001 01.28 GMT
A thief stole 7m yen (£41,000) in cash from the car of a doctor, Shinobu Ogura, while he prayed for good fortune at the Kita-in Buddhist temple in Kawagoe, Saitama prefecture.
The fact that Dr Ogura left such a large sum of money in his car has raised few eyebrows in Japan, where crime rates are far lower than in Britain and where many people prefer hard currency to credit cards and cheques.
But as an omen at this most superstitious period, the timing of his misfortune could not have been much worse.
Only 53% of Japanese people profess any strong religious convictions, but most people honour the customs of the shogatsu - New Year - festival, which is a time to wipe away the bad luck of the old year and start afresh.
The final weeks of December were spent purging the mind of unpleasant memories with bonenkai - forget-the-year parties. Then as soon as the first bell of the New Year chimed, an all-out effort began to attract good fortune in the year ahead.
Dr Ogura was among the 93m people expected to seek the favour of the gods in a traditional and spiritual fashion with a hatsumode, or first religious visit of the year.
At temples or shinto shrines, this is considered a lucky time of the year to buy road-safety charms, bats for slapping away bad luck, and omikuji - fortune slips that claim to spell out the buyer's prospects for love, business, travel and health in the year ahead.
If Dr Ogura's omikuji was at all accurate, it would have read " dai-kyo " (miserable fortune) - the worst of six possible fates - and he would have followed tradition in tying the slip to a temple tree in the hope that the bad luck would never leave the grounds.
But the misfortune appeared to be continuing yesterday afternoon as police reported that they had found no witnesses to the crime.
His fate, however, was certainly not the worst. New Year customs resulted in more tragic consequences for two elderly Japanese people who choked to death yesterday on the dish of mochi. These highly glutinous rice cakes cause fatalities every year as they can easily stick in the throat.
Nationwide, there was gloom about the year ahead. Television specials debated how Japan can recover from economic stagnation and newspaper editorials expressed anxieties about rising juvenile crime and the possibility of a new financial crisis.
The prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, acknowledged that the country faces some tough challenges.
"I feel a sense of urgency about the various problems Japan faces," he said in a New Year address that expressed sentiments with which Dr Ogura probably agrees.
