This was a short trip, and it seemed to involve a lot of sitting. Partly this is because I had to travel to many of the places I visited, so I sat on the train. Also, I have a bad leg right now, and really can't walk that much, which is a tragedy in a place like Japan, where strolling around offers so much opportunity for adventure. Ah well, such is life.
A short flight?. I hate to think that I am actually getting used to these long Asian flights, but I might be. The flight over really didn't seem that bad. But then again, it was only 10 hours. Looking back at my earlier reports, I see that the flight was 11-12 hours the other two times I flew from California to Japan. What's the deal? Both of those other times were in the fall, and this is the spring. I bet the winds change with the seasons. Anyway, 10 hours was quite tolerable.
I sat next to a Chinese-Canadian guy who read almost the entire time, taking copious notes about everything he read. His material included computer science trade magazines, white papers about new ways of organizing server structure, and Chinese history/philosophy. The latter came from an interesting book with all kinds of maps, pictures of artifacts, and reprinted sections of old tablets. Also, he read the Chinese out loud-- he did it quietly, but it did get mildly annoying, so I asked him what he was reading. I got a long and proud explanation of the superiority of Chinese language and culture. He noted that no other culture on Earth had writings from over 2,000 years ago that can still be read today. He showed me an old story about a utopian society in China, pointing out that it represents the first conceptualization of Communism, nearly two millennia before Marx. Interesting guy. He also told me that he hates Japan because it's too crowded, but when I asked where he was from in China, he said Beijing (that's not crowded? Whatever).
One other scary thing about the flight was that I recognized one of the flight attendants from the time I went to western Japan last year. I don't think I have ever seen (or recognized, at least) the same flight attendant from some earlier flight anywhere in the world.
I had a little trouble with the process of getting out of Narita airport. First I was asked many, many questions by the customs officer. Possibly he was bored; the line was short when I came through. He had to know why I was staying for only 4 days, what my occupation was, which companies I was visiting, etc. Then he noticed that the last time I was in Japan, it was just for one day, and clearly he thought this was very suspicious. Finally I answered one of his questions in Japanese, and he was startled and asked if I could speak Japanese (you could see him thinking, "She speaks Japanese, and I've been asking her questions in English all this time???"). But I assured him I couldn't really speak very well.
Then when I went to buy a train ticket, I asked for a receipt. The woman handed me my change and the receipt, but not the ticket. I put the other things away, waiting for the ticket, but when I turned back, she was helping the next customer. So I told them I still had to receive the ticket, which caused a stir because she was sure she had given it to me. The manager had to come, and she had to count all the money in her register and check it against the number of tickets that had been issued from the machine. In the end, I got my ticket, but I'm sure it was a huge embarrassment for at least one of the people involved. I was probably acting like an impolite gaijin, but I was tired enough not to care. I eventually got to the hotel and fell asleep.
Day 1: Over the Mountains and Through the Woods. On the first day, I met up with one of my company's Japanese employees, and we headed out to a countryside location to visit a couple places.
Of course, every day starts with a complete breakfast, and this hotel had the full you-shoku (Western-style food) and wa-shoku (Japanese-style food) breakfast bar. In case you weren't sure what a Western breakfast includes, here are the options we were offered: croissants, corn flakes, scrambled eggs, various meats, spaghetti noodles, salad (with Thousand Island or Japanese soy dressing), curry, and minestrone soup with pork. The wa-shoku is mostly unidentifiable stuff, but basically it consists of pickled vegetables, rice, fish cakes, broiled salmon, and sweet fried eggs. I tried a little bit, as I've done before, but I find that it's really hard to eat that stuff for breakfast. It would probably be fine for lunch or dinner, but I just can't face it at 7 am.
We took the Shinkansen up into the mountains. We sat in the special "green car," which means high-class service, reclining seats, etc. Don't even ask the price; it's like a plane ticket. The scenery was gorgeous. Alas, it was just past the sakura (cherry blossom) season, but there were still a few trees in bloom. We saw rugged mountains with nice forests, farmland, and rivers. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to load the film in my camera. Doh!!
Our first stop was a Japanese university. Japanese professors are more closely connected to industry than their American counterparts, so they can be a good source of information about certain technologies and what the top companies are doing. Japanese universities look like American ones, with somewhat run-down labs and offices, stacks of papers everywhere, students playing frisbee in jeans and tank tops, and professors that are mostly absent. Our guy did show up, fashionably late. We had a good discussion, and in fact, he had a couple of products in his lab for testing, so I got to see an obscure product that I hadn't been able to find at trade shows or in stores. Cool.
I also found out a few things about Japanese universities in general. It turns out that the Japanese government owns all the top universities-- about 7 or 8, including those of Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya, etc. It also owns several "second-tier" universities, which are mainly in smaller cities (such as the one we went to). The tuition for these places is around $7,000 per year. There are private universities in Japan, but they aren't considered quite as good. And like in the US, the private ones are insanely expensive-- as much as $20,000 per year. No wonder there is such strong competition to get into Tokyo University! If you don't, and you have to go to private university for college, you will pay through the nose!
Next we visited a nearby company. It was fun to see the manufacturing line and the "demo room" of their latest technology. I gave a short presentation, and we talked a bit. I couldn't tell how the meeting went-- they seemed awfully skeptical of what we were saying. But my colleague assured me that everything was fine, and it had been very successful. I am lucky to know what is going on in the subtext of American meetings, so I certainly have no chance of understanding a Japanese meeting. I'll take his word for it.
At the end of a long day, we took the Shinkansen back to Tokyo. The best part about it is that you can buy alcohol from the carts that come through, so we got some beer. Then we went to a sushi restaurant in Shinagawa. It was awesome (as most sushi in Japan is). I got to try a new kind that I had never heard of-- kazunoko. It looks like a slab of fish, but it's actually fish eggs in a kind of shelf-like shape. They are slightly crunchy. Frankly, it was a little too fishy for me, but it was fun to try something new. (I found out later that it is herring roe in English).
Day 2: On Display. The goal of the next day was to give a four-hour seminar on some of our recent research results. The seminar was sponsored by an association of companies that are interested in finding out market data on various topics related to electronics, semiconductors, computers, etc. People actually paid several hundred dollars to be there. I wrote the talk, but it was to be given in Japanese, so my colleague had to translate the whole thing.
No, my Japanese is not up to snuff to actually give a seminar. But I did have my first experience with Japanese public speaking when I said a few words at the beginning. I staggered through about four sentences, pretty badly I must say. But actually, I survived. And I hope the audience took it as a token of good will rather than a complete corruption of their language. As usual, you can't tell at all what people are thinking. Most of the audience sat absolutely stone-faced, although I did get one slight smile from a woman in the back.
My colleague delivered most of the talk, with me doing just one section in the middle on technology (in English). Afterward, there was a question-and-answer session, which took a long time because they would ask in Japanese, then I would need an English translation, then I could only answer in English, then it would go back to Japanese. I have no mastery of the ability to answer questions indirectly (that is, as indirectly as a Japanese person would). No matter how soft I tried to make my answers, I'm sure they were very blunt (and sometimes, I wasn't even trying to soften then). My colleague did a lot of cleaning up when he translated by answers back to Japanese. I hope it all came off all right. You can never tell in Japan.
One thing to note about this seminar: it was the first time the seminar series had ever had a woman speaker. I felt a little like I was on display there as some exotic creature from America. Ooh, a woman with a Ph.D. who can write lectures about the technology business.
For obscure reasons, we switched to a different hotel that night, and for even more obscure reasons, I ended up in the "executive suite." It's not as posh as it sounds-- in Japan, "executive" means your room is about 1.25 times the size of a typical American hotel room (but that is 3 times the size of a Japanese hotel room). Anyway, there was no Internet connection, and I found that the phone line doesn't accommodate my modem (it has a strange dial tone that the modem can't get past). So I was without email. When I expressed surprise at the poor computer facilities, my colleague said, "In the executive suite? Of course there's no Internet! Executives don't do that-- they would have their secretary do everything." Rather different from America, or at least high-tech executive America.
Day 3: Just business. Just a couple of company visits today. But a few curiosities on the side. For starters, I ordered oatmeal for breakfast. Cereal in general is a mystery to the Japanese, so you never know quite what you're going to get-- often the milk is sadly out of proportion with the cereal, for instance. This time around, I had to laugh at the "condiments" the oatmeal came with: powdered sugar, honey, salt and pepper, and ketchup. Yow. I tried the honey, but darned if I could taste any honey flavor. It seemed like plain corn syrup to me.
For lunch, more sushi. We were pressed for time, and went to one of those places where the sushi goes around a conveyer belt. They really move people through, with crisply efficient hostesses installing customers in stools as soon as they are empty. The sushi was very good. I tried a vegetable one made with pickled bamboo shoots. Yum.
Day 4: Home again. Alas, it was a short trip, and it was already time to go home. (Then again, I can't really walk well right now, so maybe it was OK). I made my way to the airport, spent my extra small-change yen on Pocky (crispy cookie sticks dipped in chocolate or fruit coating), and got on the plane. I think the winds are different in the spring because this flight was a bit over 9 hours, when it usually takes more like 8. Interesting.
Anyway, a good trip as usual, but pretty much just business this time around.
Copyright © Kim Allen 2002
