Japan Trip 2001

This is a page about my trip to Japan (Tokyo and Yokohama ) in 2001. It was a business trip, to visit Nikon and give a presentation/class on my company's product. This isn't finished, but then again it may never be. I let it slide for awhile and now haven't got the motivation to finish it. However I did at least type in my notes as they appeared on paper, so that's something.

Wednesday

Flying into Narita airport, the first thing interesting was the rural areas, farmlands, and lots of it, which for some reason I wasn't expecting. Kind of silly, but I thought Tokyo 's airport would be in an area too densely populated to have farms! As it turns out, Narita airport is a ways out of Tokyo . I see Narita spelled out in shrubs, and a huge outdoor clock with 30 foot hands. Apparently this is one of the busiest airports in the world.

I talked with a very nice guy on the 1.5 hour bus ride to Yokohama . We took the Aqua-line, half bridge and half tunnel across the Tokyo harbor. It is very rare for the Airport Limousine (a bus line) to take that route, since it's expensive, but apparently the traffic was exceptionally bad through Tokyo . He spoke English very well, which is not very common in Tokyo . I was sort of expecting more people to speak English, since I'd heard it's the main international business language. However, I guess not everybody is involved in international business! Very few people I ran into speak English well, many speak a little, and most speak little or none.

At the Yokohama station, I was totally lost, but kept walking anyway, and happened to go more or less straight to the hotel (the Yokohama Tokyu hotel) located just outside of the station). The station is big enough and complicated enough that this was fairly miraculous. On the walk I went through a pretty nice mall, which is huge and extends several levels down from ground level, I hear (didn't make it down there myself). I heard later that Yokohama station is the busiest one in Japan , and I believe it. There were approximately 2 billion people all walking quickly in different directions in there; it was packed!

Part of one of the subway stations.

The hotel room was very nice, and very small. The feel caused by the small size was noticeable, but I actually don't need much space in a hotel room, so it didn't really matter. Out the window, there were a couple of buildings, one with some flashy neon signs on it, complete with strobes on them. There was also some music going that reminded me of Blade Runner city-scene background sounds. I never figured out what it was. Sounded like yelling. Maybe some high pitched women's voices mixed in somewhere? Speaking of Blade Runner, at Narita I heard a two-tone ambulance tone which I immediately recognized from the movie and had never heard anywhere else.

The first night, I had dinner with our clients and my boss. They picked me up at the hotel a half-hour after I got there. They were all pretty surprised to see me in a suit! It doesn't happen often. I got a few compliments on it, so I guess it's not too bad. It was a pretty late night according to my clock, I got to the hotel and crashed at about 11 I think, which was about 6 am according to my body. It was a fun dinner, though, first night out, authentic place (which was packed) and good company.

A street scene. The Yokohama Tower Records.

Thursday

Thursday was the first day of class. I slept well and didn't have any trouble getting up. I didn't have much time, so I had breakfast in the Starbucks across the street from the hotel, a scone and some coffee. There were mostly Japanese in there, but a few foreigners also. Matsumoto San (San is an honorific sort of like Mr or Mrs except it's gender-neutral) met me at the hotel, and took me via train to their office, so the trip was nice and easy. Yokohama station was packed as usual.

The office building was pretty frugal, from what I saw; no money wasted on expensive furnishings! It appeared to be a fairly old office building, maybe 20 or 30 years. I didn't see much of the building, basically just the lobby and one of the conference rooms, though, but I'd best the rest was similar. Despite what looked like old furnishings, everything was automatic, from the urinals to the water dispenser.

The classroom.

There was a sign on the wall with a bunch of meeting rules. Yamamoto San translated the first few of them for me:

1) Clearly state the purpose of the meeting.

2) No talking without the meeting chair's permission.

3) Don't talk for more than 3 minutes.

So I asked her who was the chair, and she said I was. That came in handy later; I complained "Rule 2!" one time when they started talking in Japanese, just for fun.

The class went very well. Dinner that night with Matsumoto San was the best conversation and best food of the trip. He's a self-proclaimed "appetizer man" so we had lots of small dishes and lots of sake (rice wine, pronounced sock-A, not sock-E). He's a great guy, very Western style, and fun to hang out with. I had the best squid I've ever had, some cow tongue (which I decided I liked before I knew what it was), and some whale, which I don't remember. A spice mix called "seven spices" is very common there, and I liked it a lot. I haven't found any here yet, but if I see any I'll buy it.

Friday

Friday was the last day of class. In the morning, I didn't feel much like having breakfast. The room had been way too hot, and the AC didn't work (or I couldn't figure out how to make it work - one of the two). I had trouble getting email, I was using a laptop with AOL, which was a little unreliable. That morning it didn't work at all. Matsumoto San met me in the lobby again, and for the second day we both arrived in the lobby with about 5 seconds of each other. With any other Japanese, I might suspect they waited outside until they saw me come out of the elevator to be polite, but that's not really his style. I was hungry by the time we got to the destination station, so we went to a little grocery store. I didn't see much familiar so I grabbed a few health/protein bars, and went up to the counter. Normally I would just have one, but all food portions in Japan are about half the size of American portions, and these bars were no exception. There were a few people in line. When I got up there I paid, and she said something in Japanese which I didn't understand (not a very big surprise, since I hardly understand any!). So I said "Sumimasen. Wakarimasen. Eigo ga wakarimaska?" which means "I'm sorry. I don't understand. Do you understand English?". She didn't, but anyway I felt my Japanese was a big success! Matsumoto San said "Very good conversation!" and then let me know she had asked if I wanted a bag.

My class finished quickly, and then we had bring-in sushi for lunch.

In the afternoon, I met with some different people about another potential project being negotiated between our companies. My job was to clarify the technical requirements. It went fairly well, although my company had a significant misunderstanding about the project, which tripped up our discussion for awhile until I realized we were on a totally different page. I recovered well, and luckily we were all patient and pleasant and so it ended up being a successful meeting. We then ran a speed test of some code I brought to get a feel for the speed of the hardware that our software might be running on. We ran the test in a computer lab which had about 20 or 30 older computers. The most interesting part was a swimsuit calendar on the wall. I wouldn't have guessed. Oikawa San said that used to be very uncommon, but things were changing. In fact I heard that comment a lot, "it used to be, but things are changing". Whether the rate of change is really increasing or not, they seem to be acutely aware of the changes.

Hanami

I'm not sure of the exact translation of hanami, but the words in there are "flower" and "see". It's a celebration/season each year when the cherry trees bloom. There are many cherry trees there, and so when they bloom it's beautiful. It's a very big deal in Japan to participate in hanami, which typically means sitting in a park, looking at the cherry blossoms, and drinking sake. Matsumoto San and Yamamoto San had invited me to hanami, so Friday night after work, we hopped on a train and headed over to Kamakura (which is a district I guess). We stopped by a little shop and Matsumoto San picked up a bottle of Sake, and then walked to a jinja (shrine) via a grass walk bordered by cherry trees and lit by hanging paper bags. The bags had Japanese writing on them, which looked like one word per bag. I pointed to three of them and said "peace, love, and beauty?" and Matsumoto San said "No, advertisements!" It was cold there, so we just had a quick drink of Sake by a large pond and then toured the rest of the shrine.

The following are a couple of pictures that we took in the shrine.

Yamamoto San and I. That white patch on my shirt is a chemical heat patch. Matsumoto San said the patches are very popular there. It worked pretty well.

(There is no larger version of this picture.) This isn't well focused, but here are some Cherry trees by a pond in the shrine. This picture was actually taken pretty close to the same time as the previous one (15 minutes?) and it was definitely a lot darker than it looks in the picture - so Yamamoto San's digital camera is pretty good at gathering light. I asked Matsumoto San about it later and he said "Japanese technology!". It was a Nikon camera. ;)

This shrine, and the Imperial Palace I went to later, had lots of water. That's evidently a common theme in the shrines and temples there.

Then we went to a restaurant and met a couple other guys, Kitamura San who I had worked with a long time before, and Nakajima San who I hand't met. He was fairly young (about 27?) and working as a tech support guy. He was a pretty relaxed guy. I had a great time, they were all fun to talk to. Once again we had some great food, including some great octopus, and plenty of sake. All in all it was a very good day.

Dinner with the Nikon folks.

Saturday

On Saturday I headed to Akihabara, the electronics district. It's world famous, at least to hardware junkies like me. Intel's new microprocessors and other hardware tend to show up for sale there before anywhere else, so I had to check it out. In the Yokohama station, I was having a little trouble figuring out which train to take, and in which direction. One tricky thing about the JR (Japan Railway) lines is that the directions are given by seemingly random districts in that direction, some of which were not on my map. That makes it pretty tough to figure out which way to go. Fortunately, an American named Michael noticed me studying a map pretty hard and helped me out. Turned out he was heading in the same direction, so we talked on the train some. He was an ex-Navy guy, and was working there as an English teacher. He showed me his new cell phone, which had a beautiful color screen on it. I still haven't seen one nearly as nice here. Japanese phones are way ahead of ours, and way more popular. Almost everybody on the trains was playing games on or text messaging with or talking on their phone. I guess when you commute every day on a crowded train that's the easiest and best amusement available.

At Akihabara, I only made it about a block out of the station the whole day. Right across the street from the station is a big building/building set that has all kinds of little shops packed into it. There were narrow escalators running up and down the middle of the first building, and little staircases everywhere. The shops were packed with merchandise, the vast majority of which (by count anyway) was mobile phones. I saw some racks of phones with about 200 different phones on them, which was a shock given the 3 I had to choose from when I bought mine. Almost every store had lots of phones. There were also lots of cameras. I was mostly interested in PC parts, specifically video cards, and mp3 players. I only saw one or two of either. The Sony mini-disc players were way more abundant than mp3 players. The part I liked best were the display goggles, which make it look like there's a screen a few feet in front of you. They looked good, better than I expected, but were pretty expensive, and made for Japanese size noses - so they didn't fit me very well! Unfortunately, it was cold and raining outside, so when I went outside to walk to the next shop, it was cold. I went without an umbrella for awhile, but when it started to snow, I broke down and bought one! I was dressed for a warm spring, so I was pretty cold. The snow was a big surprise, and is very rare that time of year.

After I was frozen solid and hungry, I went back to a little standing-room-only restaurant by the station. To pay, you put coins in a machine and push a button next to a picture of the dish you want! Perfect for foreigners. I had some udon (noodles) tempura for about $3US. It was about the best meal I had there, or maybe I was just cold and starving. I was interesting standing at one of the eating tables and watching people walk buy outside on their way into and out of the station, felt like a pretty authentic meal.

Roppongi

That night I headed out for some night-life in the Roppongi district. It's famous for night life. I skipped the $70 cover-charge strip clubs and went to a bar that was playing some loud music. It was a western style bar, playing American music.

<From here on out, I just typed my notes as is. I ran out of motivation and time to polish them.>

I went in, noisy US Navy guys, expensive beer. Just about to bail, finishing 2^nd beer and started talking to Mari and Misa - very cute. Talked for awhile, then they invited me to a different bar, so I went with them to Motown 2, another American style bar, just getting packed. Danced a little with them, then we got a table. Mari was a secretary for American Life Insurance Co. Met Cruce from Vancouver (into fitness products - and looked it) who is living here, but moving to Hong Kong soon. Also met Glen, a marketing guy for Rage Software here for the Tokyo games show, from Liverpool. Met Honda san and his woman, who sat at our table. Great night, lots of fun, then Bruce asked if I was pulling an all nighter because the last train to Yokohama was leaving soon! So I blazed. Mari pointed me back toward the subway station. Caught the subway okay, got to Tokyo station about midnight. There were three different possible trains to Yokohama . I went to the first but the platform was totally empty, that train evidently wasn't coming. Same with the second platform. I was pretty nervous by now, not even knowing where to go try to catch a cab, and it would have been very expensive. At the third possible train's platform, there were people there, so good news. Body was telling me it was 7 am after drinking all night. It was a very tough, long train ride, very hard not to fall asleep, and I almost hurled.

Sunday

Breakfast at Starbucks again, met a guy Scott who's a electronics tech on the aircraft carrier Kitty hawk. The weather was nice.

Tokyo Game Show

It was a long ride to TGS at Nippon Convention Center . TGS was only a couple blocks from the train station. X-Box flags hanging all over the station. Most displays not too interesting. The X-Box display was huge, aluminum frame w/speakers and displays all around pointing in. In the center was a circular state which raised. Beautiful booth girls all around. Spectacular show inside w/dancing girls, fog, lights, and great sound. Pretty amazing. And the game box looked okay too.

The train station by the Nippon Convention Center .

Tokyo Games Show

X-Box display at the Tokyo Games Show.

Part of the X-Box show.

A couple of the X-Box girls.

Imperial Palace

Next I went to the Imperial Palace . I walked around the plaza some, pretty cool rock walls along the water.

Back to Yokohama for dinner. The street was packed. I went to an American style café because my attempt at a more authentic one failed. I went to one where there was a grill at each table, cheap looking place. Nobody spoke English there at all and there were no meal pictures with the menu. So I tried a little bit, but didn't get anywhere and bailed.

Part of the Imperial Palace Plaza .

Part of the Imperial Palace Moat.

The Imperial Palace wall across the moat.

After dinner I watched some street performers for awhile, a skit and some singing.

Back Home

The first night back in Seattle I could only sleep from 8PM to 1AM, not very good. But the second night I made up for it by sleeping from 10PM to 1PM the next day, much better.

Epilogue

I waited too long (3 years!) to type up my trip notes, I wasn't able to do a good job. Note to self: type up trip logs sooner.