I like New Year's Day in Tokyo. I especially enjoy driving through downtown Tokyo. Where you normally see businessmen and women briskly walking and taxis driving as if pumping people into buildings, you now see deserted streets. Emptiness and tranquility prevail. No traffic jams on the New Year's Day. You feel as if you own the town. If a flake of snow fell that day, it would be perfect. Kadomatsu, decorations made of pine trees symbolizing prosperity and peace, stand at the both sides of the entrances to office buildings and homes. Covered with snow, it takes you back to the New Years you used to enjoy in childhood, exactly like before.

However, I may not be able to enjoy the quiet and nostalgic New Year's Day this year. Recent TV news showed a Futon rental company being extraordinarily busy, preparing for the demand for thousands of Futon for New Year's Day for those workers spending New Year's Eve in their offices, through the New Year holiday. I can see lunch catering cars bringing Bento or lunch boxes along the downtown streets or parked in front of offices in Tokyo. On New Year's Day, instead of showing temples and shrines crowded with people making wishes for the year, I can see TV showing offices and factories with people staring at computer screens. This year, Y2K will alter my sentimental view of New Year's Day's peaceful pastime and leisure.

If a catastrophe occurs, it will be the most talked about, prophesized, and warned of catastrophe in the history of mankind. It will be the first catastrophe that will be broadcast throughout the world in real time via the multi-media (if they aren't hit with the Y2K bug, too!), which will be both the cause and the solution of the problem.

As I unwillingly begin backing up my digital data and files to avoid total panic when all my records in my computer are wiped out, Dr. Feynman's words come to my mind. He was a Nobel laureate physicist. His physics textbooks, assembled the lectures he gave to physics students at California Institute of Technology in the early 1960's are of treasures of my time. They are two thick, red books and are very different from the conventional physics books. He seemed to have wanted to teach how to be physicist, or how to think if one wants to be a physicist, more than physics itself -though the contents on physics were overwhelming.

The first chapter was Atoms in Motion. He posed a very interesting question and view about the concept of the atom in a "what if" scenario. If he were still alive, he may have posed his question differently, perhaps like this, "If the Y2K problem is to wipe out all you have created as an intellectual property, what would you save if you had only a few bytes of memory?"

If you feel you would enjoy reading what he wrote; or would ponder Y2K "what if" scenarios (with Y2K just around the corner), then I will quote from one of his textbooks and wish you a Happy New Year and Millennium and wish all of us survival of the first great challenge of the Cybernet world.

"If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creature, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atom hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied." Richard Feynman

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