The Rynearsons in Japan 2: The Next Few Days

Another day, another garden.  We headed into the heart of the city, caffeinated my parents at a Starbucks, and visited the Imperial Palace gardens.  I've been in places in Tokyo that say pretty loudly "Money" (there is an Aston Martin dealership down the street from the school's condo, and there are two more in the city) but the district around the Imperial Gardens really belts it out.  We walked through some awfully ritzy neighborhoods before arriving at the gardens.  My impression, distilled from an hours-long tour, is that the stonework is really the highlight of the place.  There are some places were they've done neat things with the plants, but nothing really tops huge walls made by hand out of perfectly shaped 20-ton blocks.  The fortifications are mostly absent, having burned down hundreds of years ago in some cases and more recently in others, but the foundations and stones are there and they are really impressive.  Ana was looking for a letterboxing location that happens to exist in the garden, and I'm happy to report that it was found and papers stamped with various stamps and whatnot. The pictures of the garden are a better bet than my descriptions.

 Rocks that rock - that is a full-size tree behind them

An area of the Imperial gardens with a smaller proportion of rocks

 Serious walls

Letterboxing supplies retrieval

After visiting the Gardens, we went back into the really ritzy district looking for lunch.  We toured through several floors of the very, very fancy mall  / subway station before settling on a Chinese place for lunch, which was very decent quality for the price and quite enjoyable.  I think everyone had plenty to eat, and then we retrieved our bags from the coin lockers (stashed so we didn't need to go back to the condo) and caught the train back to Kanazawa.  I think most people slept through most of that trip, and six hours later we got off the bus we'd taken from Kanazawa Station to our apartment, where we fed my parents pre-prepared pasta and sauce and collapsed into sleep.

Good Chinese food

The next day Ana and I both had work, so we left my parents briefly to their own devices in the morning.  When it was getting close to lunchtime, Ana went home and guided them from the apartment to campus, where we showed them our lovely concrete and the few gardens on campus.  That accomplished, we went to a rotating sushi bar for lunch.  If you're not familiar with rotating sushi bars, instead of ordering there is a track that goes around the entire room, with food that constantly circulates.  If you see something you like, snag it off the track and eat it, and color-coded plates will let the waitstaff tally up the cost correctly at the end.  There is a menu and you can order specific things from the staff hanging out in the center of the track, but that's less fun.  After lunch, Ana and I went back to work and sent my parents downtown to our local major garden, Kenroku'en, that being the second of the big three.  As you can see, Kanazawa was, as usual, gray and dreary. 

 Back in Kanazawa

 KIT gardens

 

 Apartment view

We regrouped around dinnertime and walked down to a local okonomiyaki place, which we described in some detail in our second-ever blog post.  Between Ana and I we interpreted more than enough of the menu, and remembered enough about how to cook okonomiyaki on the hibachi table, to allow dinner to be a success.  We have a couple of crappy cell phone pictures.

 Not remotely Japanese pizza

The Rynearsons in Japan 1

Technically, that's sort of the topic of this blog.  However, in this case it is being written about my (Lee's) parents making good on their threat to visit us here, which they did this November.  November, because it is just late enough for the plants to be asleep in New Hampshire, where their plant-related businesses reside, but still early enough here for our plants to be pretty much awake, and not covered in sleet.  November being a month when we have no special time off from work, we were able to give my parents some pointers and assistance in planning, but not to actually guide them around the country very much.  Thus, we have pictures and stories from us and them, and also from them exclusively.  We'll share some of both in the next few posts.  For the full set of pictures, see Flikr.

They flew into Tokyo on a Friday night, such that I could leave work after completing my class obligations and meet them in Tokyo Station.  I'd given them extremely detailed directions on exactly where to meet me in Tokyo Station (the information center closest to their arrival platform) and how to arrive at that point.  I was much relieved to find them there and not need to rely on plan B, wherein they would call my cellphone from a payphone of indeterminate location and tried to describe to me how they got there.  I found them less dazed and confused than I had anticipated after the roughly 30-hour transit, and we were off.

 This is about 0.5% of Tokyo Station - I recommend a map and compass

Ana had a faculty meeting that day and thus would not arrive in the city until around the time I was planning to have my parents asleep, and the task in the intervening time was to feed them their first not-airline-food meal in more than a day.  I had a Chinese place in mind in the subway station nearest the school's condo (subway stations have many, many restaurants, and stores, in Tokyo - many stations are the size of malls in the US) that I'd been eying on previous trips.  We stood outside it, examining the plastic food replicas and deciding what to order.  I knew what kinds of things were generally available and could read enough of the characters to have a pretty good idea of what we were asking for, and I wrote them down to be safe, but upon trying to get a table the staff waved us off saying that they were full, so we ended up going to the substantially less adventurous imitation-Italian place down the hall.  It was good enough, and my parents discovered the magic of  "ビル", or the fact that the Japanese word for beer is "biru" and that it is one of the few loan words that the Japanese have taken from English that they regularly understand when it is still pronounced by a native speaker.  After that, we went to the condo, put out the futon (plural like moose), were joined by Ana, and went to sleep.

Now when I have to review the kanji for cryptomeria (椙, incidentally) I think of these

The next morning we had to be up bright and early to make a train to Mito, home to one of the three most famous gardens in Japan, Kairaku'en.  Ana and I had been to the other two, so this would complete the trifecta for us.  My parents, being plant-and landscaping-centric people, had a lot of gardens to see on their trip and would be visiting all three of the most famous and good few more besides on during their visit.  Our prior experience with the Tokyo subway guiding us, we made the train easily and sat back for the trip.  This voyage showed both the city of Tokyo and some substantially rural areas out the windows of the train, and my parents speculated heavily about the Latin names of various plants they saw as they went by as they would do regularly for the rest of the trip.  I mention this especially because I'd recently learned several obscure characters for plant names, and complained along with some study partners about how pointless said characters were; my parents knew the names of the plants associated with those characters and pointed them out later on in this trip.  I afterward felt somewhat deprived of my good reason to complain about those characters.

What do you mean we need to be out the door less than eight hours after getting in?!

We arrived at Mito Station, which turned out to be a much larger station in a much larger city than I'd anticipated.  After caffeinating my coffee-deprived parents at a local McDonald's, we set out across the city to the garden, giving them an extended opportunity to see first-hand a representative Japanese city at ground-level that wasn't lengthened by more than one or two wrong turns.  One we got to Kairaku'en, we figured we were more on their turf, and ceded control of speed and direction to them.  Kairaku'en is famous as a plum-blossom garden, and thus must be stunning in February or March.  It's a little bare in November, but not disappointing.  We saw elements and styles that we'd not yet seen in Japanese gardens, and if we get the chance, we'll be back when it is in bloom.  There are acres of ancient plum trees.  We saw just about everything there was to see there, given the season, and got plum-flavored sorbet on the way out.  The other members of our party were skeptical, but I insisted and bought one for myself, whereupon they all tried it and immediately bought their own.

Entrance to Kairaku'en

Manicured trees

We had really nice weather

Interesting sunlight  through the conifers

Sorbet stand

We scampered back across the city to the train station, re-caffeinated them, and bought some fries to tide us over until our real lunch.  Mito is northeast of the city and there was a restaurant up there I'd been meaning to get around to going to - I figured my parents would have plenty of Japanese food later in the trip and that this was my chance to make the pilgrimage.  I'd read about it in the food blog of a foreigner in Tokyo who is a friend of my cousin (who lives in Tokyo six months a year) and he'd raved about it.  He also said it was small.  How small, we did not fully appreciate until we arrived.  I think we got there around 2PM, looking for lunch, which in most places is sort of a dead time of day.  Sunny Dinner, in some random not-very-important northeast Tokyo neighborhood, had an hour-long line.  We stuck it out, aiming to get four of the approximately eight seats inside.  It took courage and perseverance, but the reward was great, at least for the half of the party that cannot usually obtain outstanding burgers, which is pretty much the only thing they serve.  Other notes: I've never seen sodas that large served in Japan, and I'm pretty sure they must buy several smaller bottles of soda to pour into a glass to achieve that size, because the soda cost pretty much the same as the beers, which weren't small either.  At any rate, we found the place and we feasted, and my parents admitted to not having had burgers themselves in a year or so, and it was good.

It's about that big on the inside too

This is 50% of their tables, and there is a bar that might seat another six people...tasty burgers though

After the food, we were wiped, and retired to the condo for naps.  Post nap, we called up my cousin and met him at an izakaya (basically Japanese tapas restaurant) near his current apartment, for (what else) Japanese tapas.  There was sizzled chicken and sushi and tasty little kimchee blossoms and various fatty parts of animals, as the Japanese are wont to consume, and on the whole it was a nice, casual, low stress dinner.  After dinner, we took them to Akihabara, the electronics district, to get a real show of Tokyo neon and nerd-oscity but were disappointed to find them closing up shop at all of 10:30 at night.  What the hell, Akihabara?  What happened to playing Street Fighter 2 in the arcades until 1AM, then buying a laptop from a street vendor and taking it into a hostess bar where the hostesses wear cat ears above their French maid costumes to try it out until the sun comes up?  Do you always close down so early or was it just this once?  Sad state of affairs, if you ask me.  They're supposed to be setting the standards for the whole world up in there.  My parents professed being able to still sort of catch the vibe and managed to get some decent pictures despite it being dark.  Akihabara visited, we retired for the evening.

Tapas place

Akihabara, sadly low on neon

The Little Tomato Plant That Could

or, The Champion!

We inherited a tomato plant from a friend who left Kanazawa over the summer.  This tomato plant began having ripe tomatoes in late July (just in time for us to go to the US and miss the harvest, or so we thought), and produced into September.  We hadn't gotten much off it, but it seemed to know that it is an annual, not perennial, and would be destroyed without hesitation the moment it was no longer a contributing member of the household.  It sprouted new flowers as the last few little tomatoes were ready to eat.  Okay, we thought, let's see how far this takes us!

As it began to get cold, the tomato plant was still full of tomatoes of varying stages of ripeness.  We had it out on the porch, sort-of-hoping that the cold would end our involvement with it, but it got later and later in the year and more and more fruit set. Lee caved and brought it inside at the beginning of December, trimmed off the parts the cold had managed to kill and generally cleaned it up.  Now it lives in our sunroom:

As you can see, it is still full of tomatoes.  These pictures were in fact taken on December 10.  Not only are we still getting a perfectly ripe tomato or two daily:

we've also found some new flowers:

Champion tomato-producing plant, we salute you and your struggle to survive against Lee's pruning shears.  We've already decided to start next year's plants off of cuttings from this one - at this rate it will still be producing when those cuttings are fruiting plants themselves.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We celebrated Thanksgiving on Saturday the 27th due to having a regular workweek as Japan strangely does not feel the need to commemorate the Pilgrims' harvest festival.  Waiting until the weekend meant that foreigners could spend enough time cooking to produce real Thanksgiving food and then gather together to consume too much of it without having to worry about work the next day.

There were some non-traditional items; the pad thai (not shown) was a little unusual for Thanksgiving but good nevertheless

There was pie, and it was good

They said "pose for the camera".  I'm not sure what they were expecting to happen.

Happy Thanksgiving!

KTC School Festival, the Third

It's that time of year again!  Open Campuses, School Festivals, Safety Checks, and I work on three weekends during October.  Nearly had a 13 days in a row streak, but luckily didn't have to come in for the equipment check where they make sure you still have the same desk, drawers, cabinets, computer, and phone as before.

This past weekend I worked Saturday and Sunday (with Monday off) for the School Festival, which is kind of but not really working.  I just have to be on campus the entire time.  I also have to hang out in the tea room because I'm a part of the Ikebana club, amusing guests with my foreign-ness as I serve bitter green tea and red bean paste sweets.

Large tea bowl with not much tea

I chose poorly when we all grabbed our flowers wrapped in newspaper out of the flower bucket and I'm not all that pleased with my arrangement.  Last year's was a lot better, in my opinion.  Oh well.  Here is my flower arrangement:

Not the prettiest bunch of flowers

Of course, there's Taiko, dancing, and mochi making, and a cannon that puffs rice.  I wanted to get some footage of the rice-puffing cannon this year but that was not to be - it was a rather sporadic occurrence and I didn't have my camera when it was going.  I also forgot to bring my camera the first day, which was when the drummers performed, so sadly no pictures or video of the muscled Taiko musicians this year.  The students can also have fun by dressing up in "cosplay", or costume play, and walking around dressed as whatever they'd like to be dressed as.  Some of the older students wear the uniforms they no longer have to wear, one girl dressed up in a boy's uniform, and there were a few military-themed costumes, including Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid (he walked around with a box and hid inside of it in innocuous places, jumping out at odd moments [Lee's note: you can actually do that in the game]) and this guy:

Army Dude

Every year there's a raffle put on by the alumni association.  If you purchase a 1000 yen book of tickets, you get five coupons worth 200 yen (think $2, actually closer to $2.30 now) apiece and a chance in the raffle.  That's right, you don't lose any money and get to be in the raffle.  What are the coupons good for?  Anything put on at either KTC or KIT's school festivals.  You can even buy extra coupon sheets and use them at the later festival if you want.  The student associations put on different events such as cork gun shooting for prizes and a haunted house and all the sports clubs run food stands, so there are many things to use your coupons on.  The pancakes with syrup or chocolate sauce are particularly good.  They usually sell like hotcakes (pun intended)!

Custard-filled fish cake.  Also comes in red bean paste.

I won something in the raffle this year!  I got some strong citrus juice that's supposed to be a good mixer.  We haven't tried it yet.  Maybe next year I'll get something bigger!

Supposedly this is great with Okinawan sake...never tried that either, to my knowledge

Shoji Door Re-Papering

For the most part, taking care of a Japanese apartment is the same as any other.  Clean things that get dirty, wonder how they get so dirty so fast, dust, vacuum, rinse and repeat.  One household task that is largely unique to Japan, however, is the replacement of the paper in shoji doors.

Shoji are the old-Japanese-style interior doors.  We have one set of two shoji-style doors in our apartment, between the sun room (for drying clothes - many/most Japanese households do not have a dryer) and the office. The reason that these doors need maintenance every now and again is that they're principally made out of paper, and if you open and close the doors enough times, eventually you'll slip and put an elbow through one, or kick it by accident.

You can imagine how long the paper was pristine in our apartment, given that we've never had to be careful around paper doors before.  Actually, when we arrived, there was already a (supposed to be cute) flower patch on a hole in one of them.  We promptly ripped the other door too, sometime in the first month.  We managed to hide the flower patch in the above picture; it's on the back door, second rectangle up from the bottom behind the front door.

We finally got annoyed by the rips, figured we hadn't damaged the doors in a while, and decided to put up new paper.    First, you have to strip the old paper and glue, which isn't that difficult.  Just wet a washcloth and run it over all the wooden parts of the frame and the glue will melt and the paper can be peeled off.

Then, once the frame is dry, you have to attach the new paper.  We chose iron-on paper rather than futzing with glue and paper at the same time.  I wanted the pretty pink papers with the maple leaves on them (obviously a fall product - are housewives really that bored that they change shoji by the season?) but they wouldn't have gone with other things in the apartment and Lee probably would have set fire to them.  We spread out the paper over the frame.

While ironing it on,we followed the instructions on the package exactly, and found that following the instructions does not seem to produce the result they show.  You're supposed to tack the four corners, then work outward from the center, before sealing the four edges.  This we did, but ended up with fairly obvious crinkles and stress patterns.  I think next time I'd pin the whole thing taut and in place, then tack a million small places with the iron before pulling the pins and doing the rest.  That idea is not likely to come in handy as we're not planning on replacing the papers again unless we have to.

Ours papers not terribly straight.  They have enough wrinkles that you could in fact consider the wrinkles to have character or be a design feature or something.  So that's what they are; we have wavy modern art shoji papers for a discount.  That's the story and I'm sticking to it!

 

They don't look right, but they don't look bad either.

RoboCon

For those of you who don't know, I (Ana) was a part of FIRST Robotics through high school and college, and would likely still be working with teams today if I weren't in Japan.  However, being in Japan, there is a different robotics competition for me to cheer my head off at, RoboCon.  The RoboCon name is a shortening of Robot Contest like Pokemon is a shortening of Pocket Monsters¹. This competition is sponsored by NHK, the nationwide television broadcasting company.  There are many levels, for different students and school systems.  I teach for a Technical College, of which there are 62 in all of Japan, and we are in the Hokuriku region, so I went to Toyota City with our teams to watch the Hokuriku regional RoboCon. 

Each Technical College has two teams, an A team and a B team.  Typically, the A team is a group of seniors working on their capstone project, while the B team is anyone else in the school who would like to participate.  There are 124 teams total in the Technical College RoboCon, and 10 schools, with 20 teams, were at the regional.

The pits, or robot holding/working on area

It starts like any FIRST regional.  You walk in with your team when the doors open, everyone sits down in a section of the bleachers, and the field is already set up.  Typical FIRST teams have t-shirts for everyone on their team, while here, the schools have a box of Happi coat style or plain jackets with the school name on them that the students in the bleachers wear for the competition, but return at the end of the day.  The students that are back in the pits with the robots are given their own special team t-shirts as they have invested a lot more time and energy.  Here, instead of rushing to grab good seats, each school has an assigned section of bleachers and any non-affiliated watchers or parents sit up in the back.

Milling about, getting ready!

As this is broadcast, put on, and paid for by the television station, many aspects of the show are canned.  A man comes up at the beginning to tell everyone to keep their cell phones off so they don't mess with the robot controls or TV reception, and gives the general rules.  At the beginning of each match, the audience must hold up the appropriate number of fingers while counting down from three (san...ni...ichi...) and then raise a fist in the air and shout "Staaaato!" (start) to kick off the counter.  Any time the man from the beginning, who sat at the judges' table, waves his hand, you must cheer.  There may have been more rules, like it may have been mandatory that the cheering sections for each team on the field must all stand and others should remain seated, but I caught the first three from his opening speech.

See the blurry hand signaling to cheer? And KTC's eye-melting neon yellow coats?

Once the audience was prepped and it was time to roll camera, the male and female emcees came to the field and gave their opening spiel.  They had a little girl and a little boy from the audience help them to demonstrate the rules of the game, acting as robots themselves.  As for game rules, they were simple, as compared to many FIRST competitions, but a heck of a lot more boring as well.  The basic idea is that a bipedal "horse" robot walks across the field in one direction, in a straight line.  Then, the robot's power is cut, a "chariot" robot is attached to the "horse", and the robot goes back across the same field in the other direction, towing the chariot with a person in it.  The robot must hang a giant cardboard or foam key on a ring above the field this second trip. That's it. The robots only have to turn once, no autonomous action, no direction interaction with competing robots...not much is being asked except that bipedal motion probably verges on unreasonably hard for student teams.  FIRST tends to ask for a lot more and only gives six weeks to make the robot, and then pits the teams against each other in more exciting styles of competition.  See this link for more info about this year's FIRST competition.

More details from the Japanese competition: the students had about 30 seconds to set up their half of the field any way they wanted it.  They had ladders so they could turn the rings hanging in the center to a position their robot could use, they could make last-minute robot adjustments, and by the end, they had to have the "horse" robot at its starting line and the "chariot" robot (containing the human player who controlled the robot) at its starting area.

Emcees explaining the rules

Once the audience yelled "Staaato!" the robots started walking across the field.  If they made it, flags waved as the power was cut and the students attached the "chariot".  Once it was ready and people were clear of the field, the flag was waved again so the robot could head back to its starting area.  On the way, it must drop off a key into the ring hanging in the middle of the field before fully crossing the finish line, all in under 3 minutes and faster than their opponent.  Better do well, as it is a single-elimination competition and you potentially have only one shot to do well or fail.

KTC B Team, "horse" and "chariot"

For the first matches, the judges needed to see all aspects of the robot's capabilities to judge them for various design awards.  The teams were given the full three minutes and if a team didn't finish for whatever reason, it was allowed to show off any skills that were not seen already, like attaching to the "chariot" and placing the key into the ring.  Once all teams had been on the field, future matches were stopped as soon as one team crossed the finish line.  Many matches had obvious winners, where only one team made it to the finish line during the entire three minute period.

Another big part of the competition is robot theme.  Two teams (including our B team) had Christmas themed robots, with a Rudolf the Reindeer "horse" robot and a sleigh (with 3 Santas for us - missing the point, guys!), other teams had traditional Japanese floats, one was really cool and had a motorcycle "chariot" while the walking robot was turned on its side and had wheels for the return trip.

One odd aspect of the competition, I thought, was that the students are allowed to stop if their robot is having a problem, and bring it back to specified reset points.  If they connected it wrong and have it at an angle it can't recover from, they can stop, put it back into the starting block, and keep going.  The timer does keep counting, allowing the other team to get further, and because the two robots are in totally separate zones it's not a safety hazard, but it seems odd to me.  I suppose I'm more used to the "coopertition" of FIRST, and there your robot is either ready, or it sits dead and/or fallen on the field through the match.

Our teams did quite well, each winning two matches before losing a third.  The A team started with a bye round and got to the final four, and the B team was in the final eight.  That was the most exciting match of the entire game, with our B team losing by about three inches.  If their robot was a little faster or if they weren't the only team to carry three people instead of just one, they would have gotten it.  The A team knocked an important string out of alignment while attaching the two parts during their final match, but would have won otherwise.  I don't think either team would have won the competition had they made it further, but they did well and we're proud of them.

(There would be a video here but Blogger is not playing nice.  See it here)

Each regional gets to send 4 teams on to the national competition.  The competition winner goes.  One would think that the second through fourth places would go as well, or at least the second place team would also get to go, but that's not necessarily so.  The judges choose the other three teams based on various reasons, including how they'd fare in the design competitions on a national level.  Both of our teams won design awards, but the B team won two awards and was given the opportunity to attend nationals.  I'll be cheering them on (and knitting in the stands) in Tokyo in late November.  Lee and I think it is pretty silly to send 3/4 of teams onward based on judges picks and how good their theme is - and very Japanese.  In this case, one team was sent to nationals that was in no way functional for their regional competition, but had a lot of cool ideas that the judges liked.  That's just unfair to teams that had robots that could actually compete.

Awards Ceremony

For the parameters of the competition, it's a good program.  Specifically for Technical Colleges, available as a senior project (and therefore 6 months instead of the 6 week FIRST schedule), with a few more deliverables and a lot more self-reliance, it's a good competition.  I don't think either FIRST or RoboCon are the end-all, be-all of robotics competitions, but I do think it's great to have kids involved in such programs.  Can't wait to see what's in store in Tokyo!