[Umihito]

Hey all.

I was just wondering something, but didn't think it merited its own thread, so I'll tag it onto this one.
Basically, I was looking through Google Trends, and I noticed something strange. At the end of the year 2007, it seems that all topics related to Japan make (in some cases) a large spike in searches. I was wondering if anyone here could offer an explanation as to why search terms related to Japan spiked at that time?

Only one of my images is small enough to attach to this post, and unfortunately it only shows a very small example of a spike. but if you go onto Google Trends and type in 'hotels in Japan' and 'learn Japanese', you'll see much larger spikes.

Was something important announced, or did something happen to make it spike?