Roads in Japan

Japan has the worst technology in traffic control among all the countries I have had the chance to drive in (N and S Cyprus, US, UK, and China).

The roads are very smooth and clean, but this means nothing when you are restricted to drive 30kmh most of the time. Yes on an average trip, my estimated average speed in Japan is around 25-35kmh. So a trip that is 70km away, is sure to take longer than 2 hours. There are many reasons for this:

Motorways are very limited in numbers and have a maximum speed of 60kmh (most common) or 80kmh, and there is a strict speed control via cameras and patrol cars.  Dual carriage-ways that are not motorways have a speed limit of 50kmh, and are controlled by traffic lights for every junction (every 500meters on the one that I use most often). The most common single carriage-way roads have a speed limit of 40kmh and they are controlled by traffic light that are upto every 200m in frequency. The existence of uncontrolled junctions or roundabouts has been obliterated from Japan (because they must be unsafe). On top of all this, the traffic lights have no sensor control, and they are on 24hrs/day. 

I remember a discussion by a group of lads at the army about the "need" to have a motorway from Lefkosa to  Magusa (the two major cities in N. Cyprus). They were complaining that with the current dual-carriage-way road it took around 45minutes to travel between those two cities (of approximately 65km). I wish them a year of driving in Japan with a fully modded racing car.

9.30 curfew

Last week I have moved to a new place, a university accommodation for visiting staff and students. The new place is quite nice, with ample space indoors and outdoors, away from the crowds and close to the campus. Before I moved in I warned them about my car, and they assured me I would have no problems.

Well, once I moved I was revealed of one small secret that could be a problem. The parking area of the building I live in is only open between 6.30-21.30, and there is no way to break this rule. When I asked why this rule exists, the common excuse in every traffic related decision surfaced: safety. When I argued that the university campus is open 24hrs, and whether that means the university main campus is unsafe, a dead-lock occurred and the topic was left there.

Seeing that long discussions with the staff that work at the building made no difference, I took the topic higher up, to the bureaucrats at the main campus. A week later I was given a key to the entrance of the parking area.

Shintaro Ishihara

Chinese nationals have criminal behaviour encoded in their DNA.

French is a language which cannot count numbers.

Nanjing Massacre is fiction.

With Sangokujin(derogatory term for foreigners) repeating serious crimes, we should prepare ourselves for possible riots that may be instigated by them at the outbreak of an earthquake. As police is not always fit for handling all contingencies, the Self-Defense forces should be ready to respond to threats to public security besides natural disasters. (Foreigners make up 1.22% of the population of Japan).


These are just some excerpts from the famous quotes by Shintaro Ishihara.

Shintaro Ishihara is the governor of Tokyo. He has been in office since 1999, so he must be a successful governor in the eyes of the local residents otherwise why would he be the governor for so long?

                           Ishihara taking a Power Nap. Image by Washington Post

Some Famous Quotes by Shintaro Ishihara

Wikipedia Page.

A little help

This morning I witnessed something strange while I was cycling to work. Luckily, I had the setup on my bike to document it. Here it is:

Japanese Food

I just came back from lunch at the student cafeteria, and once again I managed to order something that I did not even know existed in the menu! Thanks to my appalling Japanese skills, I never seem to order what I see in the menu, the best I can do is to say this one and point to the food. Today I tried to order Curry, but I ended up getting something totally different.

The cool thing is that I have not been disappointed by any of the meals I have received so far! Whatever I receive turns out to be just another village in Cafe Le Ciel, and my taste buds never seem to desire my monster sandwiches for lunch time anymore.

Among the places I lived so far, Japan has to be the best place to satisfy my taste buds (although not the hunger, may I have some more please??). There is so much variety and quality in food, which reminds me of sushi, one and only thing westerners think of when Japanese food is the topic. Sushi is awesome, but I don't think it's a good representative of the Japanese cuisine, to me it's like sandwiches. I don't think any nation claims to have Sandwiches as their national food do they? I eat sushi as my lunch when I go out climbing or hiking, because they are just like little sandwiches:)

I have been warned before I came to Japan that the Japanese food is terrible, and I will be missing a lot of the western food. Well apart from the food here being awesome, which is well established by my super-convincing article here, I am not missing much of the western food. There is bread, and flour so I can make my own;) There is cheese, and most importantly there is a line of awesome ales produced under the name of Yebisu. Although wikipedia seems to claim there is only 2 types of Yebisu of Lager kind, those are simply lies and slander. I have had 5 kinds now,  all of them being from the various ale families.

So, thus far I have lived in 4 countries and the winner of the most tasty cuisine out of the four is definitely Japan. US being in the bottom of the list, UK and Cyprus sharing the 2nd place. On the other hand, US remains in the top place in terms of portions.

By the way, the pizza in Japan is better than the pizza in UK:P

Obāsan

It's been almost 4 months since I arrived Japan and I have managed to get one person to look at me and say hi in the corridors. She is one of the cleaning staff, she is around 60 years old. A friendly old lady (Obāsan) with very little care in the way of formality, and dedicated to her job.

I went to the toilet a few weeks ago.  When I was washing my hands, Obāsan came in and immediately started scrubbing one of the urinals, while another man was using another urinal nearby.

Unmanned Air Vehicles

It's been 10 days since the big earthquake/tsunami in Japan and the following problems at the nuclear power-plant. Things seem to be improving now, and the reactors are slowly getting under control. The biggest trouble with the reactors was overheating, and the initial efforts in cooling the reactors down involved dousing them by seawater via aerial vehicles; i.e. helicopters. However this was not as easily done as it sounds because of the high radiation levels around the power-plant. The helicopter needed to be right above the power-plant in order to drop seawater for cooling, but this meant the crew had to be exposed to high radiation levels. In fact the mission was aborted a few times because of the dangerously high radiation levels. But then if the reactors were not cooled down the risk of a bigger radiation leak was there.

In short, people had to get to the reactor in order to tame it but then they could not get there because it was dangerous. Kind of a catch 22 situation. A lot of people who knew this situation must have thought what I have; what about robots? what about UAVs? Japan is famous for all the cool robots; bipedal, lifelike, violin playing, etc. I always had the impression that long-range, remotely controlled, high precision robots were available for entering dangerous areas like Fukushima power-plant and carrying out the tasks we do not want. I guess I was wrong. Even if we forego the high-precision side of things how hard would it be to have a large robot that can function as an unmanned fire-truck? 

  US military robots. 

Photo by U.S. federal government.

On the other hand, it seems possible to produce robots that can carry heavy artillery to rain bullets and bombs on terrorists of various kinds, but not water? But then again, what about UAVs? US and Israel has loads of UAVs that can destroy a village without any problem, why not carry water? Either the Japanese government and Tepco was very stupid about not making use of robots and drones or more likely there are none that would have been useful. It's simply sad to see the technological priorities of our time.

   "Reaper" - UAVs are good at destroying. 

Photo by U.S. federal government.

If Japan could have used robots and UAVs , some individuals would have been spared the high doses of radiation hits they had to receive. Also, there may not have been a reason to have the heroic Fukushima 50, and this whole situation with the nuclear plant might have been under control much quicker.

"More than 40 people were killed in Pakistan last week in a US drone attack..." 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12784129

Could this technology been altered to save more than 40 people?

Japan Earthquake Day 3

It has been 3 days since the massive earthquake off the north coast of Japan. The aftermath keeps getting worse and worse than as it seemed initially. Large number of aftershocks, tsunamis and now a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. The world has certainly focused on the disaster in Japan, and there seems to be a lot of fuss. My mom just told me that on a Turkish TV channel "experts" were discussing the possibility of drifting radioactive particles reaching Turkey, and the worst possible health implications.

Contrary to all the extreme drama being played on some of the international news stations, the Japanese news agencies seems to be playing things down. There are no news reports about the poor kids losing their parents, people drifting down the powerful tsunami streams or even anyone crying. I have not watched much TV though, so this is my impression only from less than couple of hours of TV time.

                No such frames seemed to appear on the Japanese TV © RECORDED PICTURES

The life here in Kyoto (approx. 800km from the epicenter) is no different than it was before the disaster, and everybody seems calm. There is plenty of goods and services for everybody, which is contrary to the situation up north, and nobody seemed to worry about the nuclear meltdown.

A Lecture about Research Experience in Japan

Today was the first day of a 3 day long orientation session for the new JSPS postdoctoral fellows (like me). The session featured talks such as;"Introduction of JSPS",  "Japanese Research System and JSPS's Activities",  an enthusiastic lecture on "The Japanese Language and its Cultural Context", "Introduction of JSPS Science Dialogue", a lecture by JSPS second year fellow "About Research Experience in Japan", and "Introduction of JSPS Alumni Associations".

The last talk was reduced from 20 minutes to 5 minutes. This was due to the previous talk lasting 45 minutes instead of 20! It was a fantastic display of self promotion without any boundaries, done in a very entertaining way. It was an incredible talk, and I want to name the person who gave the speech as I believe his CV may have something to teach us people pursuing a career in academics.

The aforementioned speaker is Dr. Sulayman K. Sowe:  http://www.merit.unu.edu/about/profile.php?id=1110&stage=2. A remarkable showman, and a determined academic on his way to becoming a professor sooner than most of us.

His speech was supposed to be about his research experience in Japan, but this person has been in Japan only 1.5 months longer than us, the people he was lecturing! So, what did he have to teach us that he might have learnt by living here for 45 days longer? Was his experience enough to talk to us about it for 20 minutes? The answer is no. The first thing he did was to admit this and simply to jump to an introduction of himself. An introduction that highlighted his achievements, and professional experience and lasted for half an hour! The whole time he was very amusing, and he told us what a great guy he is in a very humorous way. A lot of us laughed, some for different reasons, and some of us frowned at the obvious shameless self promotion this guy was doing. After 25 minutes into his talk, one of the Japanese hosts gave him a note in a very discreet and polite way. He took the note and read it out loud: "Please try to wrap up your talk in 1.. minutes", well he actually read 100 minutes just to be humorous (?). He continued his lecture about how awesome he was, and towards the end he told us about the experience he had in Japan , which had nothing new to anybody who has been in Japan for more than 7 days.

One interesting advice he gave us was this; "Don't be a nuisance". He told us to know our limits, and not to expect any negative feedback from the Japanese people as they are too polite to do so. He said; "They will always say, Yes, and will not stop you if you are annoying them." I guess these words reflect the truth, but why should we not bother the Japanese if there is a personal gain?

Google Translate

Google Translate is a wonderful tool. I solve a lot of my problems in Japan thanks to Google Translate, and without it I think life would have been much harder here.

However, there are times where google translate fails to make any sense out of the Japanese webpages, and sometimes it misleads me by incorrect translations. I have done a small and simple experiment to see how much a simple sentence will change after 5 translations.  I start with an English sentence and translate it to Japanese, and then translate the Japanese sentence back to English, so on and so forth. I did this until I have 5 variants of the Japanese sentence. Here is what I got;

START: I can't send all of them via email because there are so many.

非常に多くあるので、私は電子メールを介してそれらのすべてを送信することはできません。
Because so many, I can not send email through them all can not.
たくさんいるので、私ができるすべてのそれらを介して電子メールを送信することはできません。
Because a lot to send them via e-mail all I can not. -- At this stage google is asking me to correct "e-mail" to "email"
多くの電子メールを介して送信するので、すべて私がすることはできません。
Because many e-mail sent through, all I can be.
多くの電子メールを介して送信されるので、すべて私がすることができます。
Will be sent via email often all I can.
多くの場合、すべて私がすることができます電子メールを介して送信されます。
END: In many cases, will be sent via e-mail everything I can.

Corridor Talk

Back in York, me and Martin used to constantly moan about how unfriendly some of the people in our department are, and how hard it is to get a hello out of them. It was our mission (especially Martin's) to say hello to everything that moved in our corridors and get a word or two out of people. We occasionally succeeded and got to talk to people. Eventually, there were always a few who always stopped and had a chat for a few minutes with us. 

Here in Japan, the situation is much worse. I don't know most of the people in my department and they don't know me. There is no smiling or saying "konnichiwa". There is only a single professor who smiles at me when we meet in the corridors, and he occasionally asks the question: "Are you enjoying your stay in Japan?" Always the same question accompanied by the same answer: "Very much." I have no corridor talk here, but may be that's my fault. I am a big scary foreigner, people don't know how I may react. I will try to smile and say hello to everyone from now on, see if I get a few responders.

Bendensin

Bouldering at Kasagi

Last Sunday, I went out climbing for the first time since I have been to Japan. It was with a group from the climbing club at the University. Our destination was Kasagi, where the activity of the day was bouldering. It was a good day and everybody seemed to enjoy it. I took a few photos of people flying:

Yasuto Flying for the Jug

Falling off

I also got some finger wounds which will put me off climbing for a while. At the end of the trip, when I asked what the cost of transportation was, I was told that there is no charge; this trip was a gift. This might be nothing out of the ordinary to people of such nature:

Bendensin

To me this was a little unusual, because the workings of the club is very systematic, and I was clearly told that the petrol costs are to be shared. But still, they wanted to be kind and provided this trip as a treat.Can there be an underlying message? Either-way, I appreciated the trip and the kind gesture.

Research Funding in Japan

I had a discussion about what to do with some money we have with my host researcher. The department gave us quite a bit of money (more than $100K), but we don't know what to do. At the moment the best way to spend the money is to fund some students, but we can't do that. Apparently, the Japanese research councils do not allocate any funds for a research project to get some students. All the funding is for buying hardware. So we have this money and we are being asked to buy hardware, but there is nobody to use it. I gave some suggestions but the host researcher keeps worrying that no one will use it. I think there is no need to care at this point... If someone tells me to spend their money on buying robots for myself, I would, and I wouldn't think too much about it. We get paid to think, so essentially by thinking too much we are already wasting money. So think less, and do more I say!

The use of the Robot

It breaks my heart to write this entry, as it explains a dreadful act.
The previously mentioned robot given to my office-mate is being used for a social behaviour research, and this is done as such:

1. Tape the face of the robot with a white piece of paper.
2. Place a projector in front of the robot's face.
3. Project an animated face from a PC on to the white piece of paper.
4. Play a sound file asking several questions to a test subject and make the face smile or look sad depending on the answer by clicking the smile or sad face button.
5. Ask the subject to fill out a questionnaire about how friendly the robot was.

So in short, the robot is used to project an animated face on. So, as a white screen. That's it!

I did this test, and I said it was not friendly at all.

Robot

There is an incredible robot in the office to assist the part-time researcher that I share my office with. As far as I know she has nothing to do with computer science, but the robot will be helpful for her research.

This is what she gets to play with.

This is one really cool thing about Japanese research institutes, there is plenty of technology available and no shortage of monetary funds for Toys. I was also offered some funding for robots but there is none in the field that would be of any use to me...Perhaps one day I can get to have a cool robot...one can dream huh?


Written on 07 January .

Mountaineering Club Orientation

I was at the climbing wall of the university club last night. I met one of the "senior" members, so he gave me a lesson on lead climbing and belaying. I have to go through this in order to belay somebody and lead the routes available at the wall. I still learned a few things even though I have been climbing for four years now.

Belaying: I have to wait for the climber to yell "tension!" before I take it tight when he reaches the top. I have to count the number of hangers on the route and advise the climber on how many quickdraws he should be carrying. Last but by no means least, I have to wear gloves. When I told them, in the 4 years of climbing in 6 different countries I have never seen anybody wearing gloves for belaying. They gave me a strange look and simply did not believe. I found an educational climbing book in the room, flipped a few pages and found a guy belaying with no gloves just to make my point. They said ooh that's baad.

This is what I must wear for belaying.

Leading: I have to clip every bolt, this may seem obvious. But this is a real annoyance when the wall is over-bolted. I can always clip two bolts at a time, and it doesn't matter if I have the higher bolt clipped, the one below it needs to be in. After the leading is over, and I am being lowered off, I have to follow a well drawn out procedure for quickdraw retrieval: Unclip the bolt, clip onto the gear-loop, unclip the rope. This sequence must always be followed in the order written. Yes, that's correct. Clip the quickdraw onto the gear-loop before unclipping from the rope. Whoever came up with this convinced the kids at the gym that this is a good idea and will prevent dropping a quickdraw. But what they did not realize is that often a rope is quite tight at places, and the pull it generates may easily be over 5kgs, which is the rated strength of gear loops. When I told them that they have a recipe for ruining harnesses and possibly dropping 5 quickdraws instead of one, they were puzzled but still insistent that I have to use this procedure.

University Mountaineering Club

Amongst the clutter of badly linked and Japanese-only web-pages of the university, I managed to find some information about the university's mountaineering club. I got in touch and it turns out they have the biggest climbing wall in the area!

They invited me over, and we met. I asked if I can climb, and they said top-rope only, leading will be allowed after becoming a member. So I asked, how do I become a member? They asked my id, then things became complicated... You see being a visiting researcher, I am not even entitled to a proper ID. It's just a card that I have. So they ring up some places to figure out who I am. Then they figure out that I am not a student.

They tell me they can not make me a member and I have to talk to sports centre first. I said OK, and went to sports centre the next day. Well, after not being able to communicate with the sport centre staff for half an hour, I left. I went back the day after with my gaijin supervisor. He explained them the situation, and they explained back: no-one has made a request of this kind before, and they do not know how to proceed. Apparently, none of the university staff, none of the researchers and academics never ever wanted to use the university sports facilities even though they are the best in the area.... Hmm... Well after an hour of "not knowing what to do", they told us to come back the next day. So we did! But to my misery their response was: "Chotto Dekinai" = A little impossible.

When I asked "Why?" (not a common question in Japan it seems), they said that my level is too high to join a student club. I told them I don't care about the club I want to use the wall. They said the wall belongs to the club and I may ask permission from them, there is nothing the university can do.

Luckily, the students at the club are very respectful (since I am a high level person to them) and kind, so they will allow me to join their trips and use their wall. I think...

My very own party

When I was told that there is going to be a "party" in my name I was a bit shocked. A party?

Well it turns out it's just me, my 2 supervisors and the master students of our lab going out and having dinner. I was thinking in the lines of renting a room and blasting some music and getting drunk I guess.

It was very pleasant to say the least. For the first time I got to communicate with Japanese, we had some discussions and a lot of chit chat. They paid special attention to always having a member of the group talking to me. At one point some people even swapped seats so that I get to talk to the ones who were far away from my side of the table.

It was a very sociable night, Japanese can be warm and talkative after all. Though, the beer and whisky may have had something to with this!

Meeting with my Japanese supervisor

I have two supervisors here, one gaijin and one Japanese. The gaijin has been the main character in everything related to me here in Japan. He has been absolutely great.

I met my Japanese supervisor for the first time, few days after I received my desk. He seemed very pleasant, but the only topic we discussed was about my impression of Japan. Of course he said I can ask for help from him whenever I want, but there was nothing work related on the table.

First Day at the Bouldering Wall

I was very excited to go to the Kyoto's famous bouldering wall. On a Sunday, I hoped to see a lot of people there. There was bound to be some climbers who could speak English, in the end climbing is an international sport. Climbers are usually very warm and sociable people, albeit a bit eccentric. So, I thought I would make some friends. Well, I was right and then I was wrong.

The place was busy, but the amount of interaction I hoped to have totaled to zero. No-one seemed to be interested in talking, in fact people avoided eye contact. At first, I thought this was because of the fear of gaijins, but then I realized that very few people talked to each other. Japanese climbers ignored each other as well as me.

Japanese are shy? value their privacy? not sociable?

well I have a little under 2 years to figure that out.

Day 3 - Telegraph Road

One of the great songs by Dire Straits where Mark Knopfler goes on with his solos for a very long time:

http://youtu.be/dd3btVhwr48

I met a fellow climber today, a very enthusiastic American chap. He had the Mark Knopfler syndrome though...he kept on going solo for minutes on. I was very tired at the end of our conversation, but I figured out one thing about the Japanese people: most of them pursue the no-conflict policy, and even if they are right they seem to accept defeat in order to not argue with a big and tall gaijin (foreigner). My fellow climber seemed to have created a few mishaps, and ended up financially benefiting from them.

Apparently, a few others informed me, gaijins are viewed as a big source of crime in Japan (by the Japanese).

Day 1 - The Airport

For what may be the first time in my life, a flight to a new country that is far away from home was without a single glitch. I was feeling good, I got my bags safe and sound, and I was at the right airport. On top of this the officers at the border check were extremely polite. A massive shock to me after the American, and British officials, who always seemed a step away from giving me a colonoscopy.

The first impression of Japan: The people are very polite.