August Nagoya Trip

No denying we were lazy about getting this one posted. The Japan Society for Engineering Education had its annual meeting in Nagoya this year in August, and we went. I (Lee) had a paper to present, and Ana got KTC to cover her travel so that she could attend the conference for free as well. The paper I was presenting was not really mine, but I was the only one of the thirteen listed authors who spoke English as a native language and was planning on being in Japan at the time. The JSEE has one international track in English and about ten Japanese tracks (in Japanese), and I presented during the international session. The paper itself was about a project I've been involved with where we team up Japanese, Chinese, and American students to work on engineering projects, using the internet and web conferencing to share information.

It also involves buying the most and biggest monitors possible.

Nagoya is about a four hour train ride southeast of Kanzawa, on the east coast of Japan between Tokyo and Osaka. It's a pretty big city. We left on a Friday as it would not be possible to travel there early enough on Saturday to make the presentation time. We had a hotel reserved that had been suggested by my boss, who was also attending, but apparently he valued cost over convenience as it was on the other side of the city from Nagoya University, where the conference was being held.

We took the subway across the city, and had just figured out where we needed to go when we were ambushed by a Japanese person who felt we needed navigational assistance and proceeded to help us with the manner and enthusiasm of an overactive puppy. This is a natural and not uncommon hazard if you make the mistake of being A) foreign and B) unsure in public. He walked us to the right train and apologized profusely for not taking us all the way there, citing the necessity of attending prior engagements. We of course thanked him and were pleased to know that we had, in fact, correctly determined where we were and where we were going, though this is more helpful when one is actually lost.

We made it to Nagoya Univerisity and wandered the whole campus before finding the sign-in desk. We spent a lot of time looking at the posted maps and calling my boss, who had his phone off because he was watching early presentations. I should mention - Nagoya in August is positively sweltering. Incredibly hot and sticky. People told us that Kanazawa is like that sometimes but Nagoya is like that always. We're quite glad not to have to deal with that on a regular basis. After finding the conference's base of operations, we discovered that about half of my department was already in attendance so we had some people we knew to hang out with until the opening dinner started.

A cool day in Nagoya

As usual for this kind of thing, dinner was opened by speeches followed by a toast, and because the there were guests of honor representing the ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) and SEFI (Société Européenne pour la Formation des Ingénieurs, aka Europäische Gesellschaft für Ingenieur-Ausbildung, aka European Society for Engineering Education), those being American and European engineering education societies, two of the speeches were pleasantly in English. The dinner was better than usual as it was a more casual affair and that means fewer sea cucumbers and more dishes containing no unspeakable fish parts whatsoever. There was also wine in addition to beer, so things got convivial rather quickly. Despite my utter lack of importance in the grand scheme of things, several Japanese individuals from major industrial and academic concerns felt the urge to make my acquaintance during this time. I have no idea why Ana and I were introduced by my boss to several people far more important than us whose names and titles I can no longer remember, though I have a stack of business cards half an inch thick. After the party, he lead us back to the hotel which was good because we never would have found it alone.

Us with important European engineering education guy and some other people.

The next morning, we got dressed up and went all the way back across the city to the school to attend the international session. I found the presentations to be pretty lightweight, fluffy stuff, much like the so-called paper I was responsible for presenting. Lots of "hey, our school is doing this nifty thing" and not a lot of "rigorous analysis of this nifty thing our school did shows that...". There were some good ones. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait that long for my turn despite the fact that some people completely ignoring their time limits, and did an adequate job of giving the presentation with no major faux pas to speak of. I believe aside from the ASEE representative I was the only person in the room who was a native speaker of English so mine probably sounded darn good in comparison.

The room actually had about a hundred people in it, sitting further back.

A bit after my presentation the session broke for lunch and we took the opportunity to fly the coop to go see Nagoya. We were feeling a little bit guilty about skipping the rest of the conference, but then we encountered my boss on the subway, skipping it himself to go to a pottery museum. The pangs of conscience un-panged. It would have taken over an hour to go back to the hotel, so we didn't, and therefore didn't have the camera for the rest of the day. This was unfortunate, though I'll fill in with pictures from the internet. The first order of business was lunch, and we went for Chinese. We both got a lunch set, which in this restaurant apparently means "please bring us enough food for six people". We really had three full lunches apiece to choose from, and most of them were pretty good. I wish this place was local instead of four hours away; I've never seen that much food served in Japan, period, let alone at that price.

We had an English tourist guide to Nagoya along with some coupons from the conference packet, so we took a look at what was out there. There were more things we were interested in than we had time to do, so we basically each picked the one we wanted most and did those. I wanted the Tokugawa museum and garden (Tokugawa-en) and Ana wanted the Nagoya aquarium (actually the zoo, but since we've done so many zoos already and the aquarium was open later, we went with that). We did the museum first. After getting totally soaked by the heat traveling there (I'm in a collared shirt and dress pants in the blasting August afternoon sun) we arrived, going through the garden first and then the museum. The garden was much calmer and less crowded than Kenroku-en both in number of people and design. It worked better as a whole, feeling much more natural and sedate, though it does not have the awe-striking 400-year-old trees of Kenroku-en. There were a few stunning waterfalls though. I really wish we'd had our camera for this. I recommend searching for it on Flikr like this to see many pictures of mostly this garden.

Main pool of Tokugawa-en

The museum showed artifacts from the sixteenth and seventeenth century mostly. Swords, armor, pottery, clothing, and scrolls, among others. Some of the items shown were loot from the expeditions into Korea, or otherwise descended from non-Japanese origins. I found most impressive some of the items that had belonged sequentially to many of the most powerful feudal lords, including several swords. To compare, you might think about a cavalry saber that had been carried and used by both Grant and Lee - if your eyes don't bug out, you don't know what you're looking at. These were items of the most pivotal men in Japanese history before 1850, and they would have been impressive even without the history behind them. A few of the items were exceedingly old, in excess of 700 years of age, mostly from China. We enjoyed the museum considerably, and understand that there are more museums with more extensive collections elsewhere in Japan. Hopefully we'll get a chance to see some of those.

Next up was Ana's choice, the Nagoya aquarium. Apparently the sigil of the old lords of Nagoya was a dolphin, because the city is all about dolphins, and so is the aquarium. It wasn't the biggest aquarium we've been to, or it didn't seem that way, but it had all kinds of dolphins and some smaller whales like beluga. The rest was pretty standard aquarium stuff, with a few really cool multilevel tanks, and at the very end we caught the last dolphin show, which combined incredible cheesiness with some pretty good tricks. You can see pictures of the harbor and aquarium here.

The aquarium is in a district similar to the Baltimore inner harbor, with a lot of development and tourist stuff in the area. One of the tourist attractions was a genuine Red Lobster, with big windows looking out over the harbor. Now, I don't think Red Lobster is the most amazing restaurant one can find, but in Japan, looking for something that tastes more like New England, Red Lobster sounded pretty good. The menu was not the same as you would find in the states (no biscuits, the horror!), and it was definitely a bit more upscale than usual, but it had a lot of interesting choices and reasonable prices. After that we went back to the hotel for an early night in preparation for catching the morning train back to Kanazawa.

Picture of fire from:

http://www.davesdrumworld.com/Misc-pics/images/Fire.jpg

Picture of Tokugawa-en from:

http://www.city.nagoya.jp/_res/usr/c/059/550/tokugawaen.jpg