The Japanese system of writing is very complicated because it uses 3 types of characters. For 60 years, Kyodo News, Japan's leading news agency, has issued "Kisha (reporter) Handbook" as a guide for writing articles for Kyodo and nationwide newspaper publications like The Associated Press Stylebook. In addition to journalistic organizations, a wide range of Japanese people use the handbook as a companion for easy-to-understand sentences. The handbook is based on the national language policy, which has been a basis for compulsory education and has implemented changes in definition and usage of words. In this paper, I introduce recently revised content. I also describe the process in which the handbook was formed, in the context of transformation of the written Japanese language after World War 2 under US-led occupation policy. I also mention aims and objectives of the recent revised editions in 2010 and 2016.

Weather information is utilized as fundamental information of society in various fields. The Japan Meteorological Agency has been developing the weather information, such as improving forecast skills with increasing power of supercomputers, producing the information in smaller regional scales and providing all weather messages by an universal format (XML). In collaboration with the dramatic development of information and communication technology (ICT) in recent years, the weather information is expected to be utilized in more advanced ways. To support the utilization of weather information and improving social productivity further, the Weather Business Promotion Consortium was established on March 7, 2017 with the support of companies and experts interested in weather and ICT.

Digital watermark is a data hiding technology applied to copyright protection of digital contents. In copyright protection of still pictures, it is used at broadcasting stations, newspaper companies, magazine companies, and also at manufacturing industries. Meanwhile, as for copyright protection of moving pictures, broadcasting firms sometimes apply digital watermark to keep their copy rights contracts, but in restricting illegal uploading to the video sharing website on personal basis, digital watermark has not prevailed because of its heavy load of processing and/or some other methods coming to the fore. However, digital watermark will be complement for other rights management methods and be embedded in edge devices such as Set Top Boxes. We will continue developing kinds of applications.

While the number of heavy rainfalls that magnitude rivals designed flood control level increases, associated flood disasters are becoming serious issue. For mitigating flood disasters in urbanized areas, effective use of existing available information, such as flood control facilities or observation records, are necessary. In particular, model predictions play an important role, and as coastal low lying areas are highly urbanized in Japan, it is necessary to consider composite hydraulic effects of river flood, urban inundation and coastal storm surges. In this study, we present ongoing development of an advanced flood countermeasure in the Tsurumi river basin where integrated flood management has been taken place. The development research comprehensively combines the seamlessly integrated river-, urban-, and coastal hydraulics model with the information of flood control facilities and fine-resolved rainfall.

I will report the review process and information sharing method up to library system renewal at Saitama Medical University April 2016. The selection policies are (1) not to create specifications, (2) not to customize, (3) to evaluate by checklist. As a result of the selection, old vendor was changed. New vendor carried out data migration. At the end of March 2016, an operation meeting where all library staffs participated was held and recognition of how to use the system was unified. NAS (Network Attached Storage) and chat tool Slack were used for information sharing. It was confirmed that the use of these tools alleviates the burden on system personnel.

Sharing research data has recently become one of the main issues on scholarly communication. Some topics are often discussed, such as the vision of the new way of scientific research, the making of worldwide standardized rule about data sharing, and the making national policies of data management. However, specific actions on research data management have gradually begun to be reported in these days, even in U.S. or European institutions. In this article, we reported the results of the questionnaire survey on the current status of research data management in the Japanese universities and research institutions. The questionnaires were sent to 494 universities and research institutions, in which we asked several topics, such as perceptions on open research data, whether the management plan or some guidelines about research data are made or not, and the condition of institutions about open research data. As the result, we revealed that both of regulation (rulemaking) of data management plan and building infrastructures for preserving research data have not been improved yet. We also revealed that only the guidelines to prevent research misconduct are released in many institutions.