Tuka Co., Ltd. announced to sell the world's first cellphone, the "TS 41", equipped with osseous conduction speaker called 'Sonic Speaker'. Because the TS 41 has a Sonic Speaker as well as normal ones, voices from the Speaker can be caught easily even in the noisy surroundings. Osseous conduction method can relay sound waves from the speaker to auditory organ through skull bone instead of eardrum. Using this method, we can hear sounds by putting a cellphone on the head even if ears were covered.

On the other hand, additional features of cellphone are more and more sofisticated. NTT Docomo Group released the latest series of cellphone "505iS" which is equiped with outstanding charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, and can take 2.02 million pixel photos. As a result of introducing innovative new models of cellphones in the market, the net increase of subscribers in the first half of 2003 was 2.938 million.

At department store where people buy goods prepairing for New Year, a traditional New Year dishes called 'Osechi' made for dogs appeared this year. One dog-lover cook made it because more and more people wish to celebrate the New Year with their pets in Japanese traditional style. The dishes are in tiered food boxes and cost about JPY18,000 (USD1,940), almost same price of mankind's.

Besides, Index Co., Ltd. starts to provide a new function for cellphone users of dog language translation machine called "Bowlingual" released by TAKARA Co., Ltd last year. Bowlingual is a communication tool which enables dog owners to understand what their dogs say. It can analyze how dogs bark and show their emotion on cellphone screen with illustration and text such as 'happy', 'sad' or 'frustrated'.

As increasing number of owners treat their pets like their family members, further new services and products will be expected to come up to Japanese market.