Part I: A trip to Iga, Japan. It's on the central island, Honshu, just outside of Kyoto, Japan. Here we visited a machine tool plant. They make a bunch of the machines we have in the lab. It was interesting to see a Japanese manufacturing plant, but more interesting to see the some nuances of Japanese culture. Everyone is extremely formal, constantly saying 'thank you', and bowing. Women seem a bit more subsurvient, which was strange coming from Berkeley. They also seem to love uniforms, everyone has one!
Part II: After a day in Iga, we traveled to a small mountain city called Chino. It was basically a resort town very close to Nagano, where the Olympics were held in 1998. This place was supposed to be popluar during the winter months for skiing, and the summer months for escaping Japan's extreme heat. Unfortunately June and July are Japan's rainy season, so it rained pretty much the entire time I was there. This limited sight seeing to the couple of hours in the morning when it would sprinkle, as opposed to downpouring. The conference went well, and my talk was well recieved. I had a 1/2 hour presentation in front of about 100 distinguished prof's, so I was a bit nervous, but all went well. The food was exellent, but more western in style. We did have caviar and sushi every night though. I broke from my vegetarian diet briefly to try some caviar since I've never tasted it.
This was a river that ran through town, the mountains behind it are shrouded in the clouds, just like in the movies:
This was a cool shrine I stumbled upon during a morning walk through Chino:
Part III: After the conference my advisor Dave, and our lab manager Sangkee traveled to Nagoya. This is the second largest city in Japan. It's pretty overwhelming, due to it's size, and the fact that there is very little english signage. The first morning we visited a manufacturing plant for Denso, a major part supplier for Toyota (a company similar to Delphi here in the states). This was also pretty interesting. One of their manufacturing lines consisted of 20+ milling machines set up to completely machine a ABS brake part, with over 30 features on it. Engineers find this stuff pretty interesting, but a half a day of walking around the plant and I was ready to get out of there. That night we finally tasted some authentic Japanese cuisine, I had some tempura, udon, miso, and a couple of other things I can't spell. It was really good. Although Japanese dishes utilize a lot of seafood, it is overall pretty vegetarian friendly.
My last day was supposed to include some hard-core sightseeing, I had planned a nice route to check out some castles (dating back to the 1400's), shrines, and a couple of tea houses, but unfortunately a typhoon rolled into town...yes thats right, a typhoon: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/world/asia/15japan.html
As you can see from the picture from the hotel, it was raining pretty good:
So I settled for attempting to navigate the city's subway system, which went ok, and did a little shopping. This was quite an experience in Japanese culture. The shopping experience is based around a department store, which is basically a vertical mall. Instead of everything being spread out horizontally like in the states, you travel up and down these huge skyscrapers with tons of stores scattered around the different floors.
I managed to get a bunch of shopping in before having to high-tail it to the airport. I nearly got on a train going away from the airport, when lucklily I saw a number of people with large bags getting on a train on the other side of the platform, and figured I had it mixed up. I arrived at the airport, and after taking one look at a plane trying to take off in typhoon like conditions, I figured our flight would be cancelled. Pretty much all the domestic flights were cancelled, but luckily ours wasn't. The take-off, and trip back were pretty uneventful.
I'm adjusting to the time-change just fine, and don't seem to be experiencing too much jet-lag which is nice. I am a bit tired overall though, due to longer days, and trying to stay awake for day-long conference proceedings. All in all, a great trip, feel free to check out some other pics: http://www.flickr.com/gp/9676192@N02/E119Gb
Take Care,
-Jeff
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