a-cubed.info

I’ve been meaning to write this for almost two weeks, since getting back from a brief trip to Matsuyama on Shikoku island (literally, the “fourth country”). Murata-sensei and I were visiting Orito-san of Ehime University and doing some research on CCTV in Japan. While I was there I had three meals that were worth reporting on, all for different reasons. (more…)

Last weekend after visiting the National Park for Nature Study in Meguro, we went for lunch at a Chinese restaurant near Shirokanedai called Bamiyan. It’s a chain whose principle distinctive feature is a bottomless cup for drinks via a self-service bar. Unfortunately this means that people tend to go in, order something cheap and occupy their seats for long periods. Rather than decide that the free bar is the problem, they apparently decided that it’s these "semi-free"loaders that are the issue and so they make the place very irritating to stay in for long. They do this by playing "music box" muzak constantly. One or two songs is bearable, but after half an hour it gets on the nerves to much that one has to leave. Certainly for me, this is definitely defeats the object as I won’t go to one of these again unless there’s no other choice.

There seems to have been an earthquake in Tokyo just now. Not a particularly strong one. I’m on the fifth floor of a nine story building and ti wibbled and wobbled around a bit but not worrying or anything. When I was here last year there were two or three earthquakes in Japan which were supposed to be possible to sense in Tokyo (well, I was living in Kawasaki actually, but there too) but I must have slept through the very minor tremors that were felt in this area.

It does raise the question, though, about why people move to earthquake and other risk zones (volcanoes etc). If you grew up somewhere, it’s reasonable to stay, I suppose, but it does make me wonder about my own risk perceptions and cost/benefit analyses that I’m willing to move somewhere prone to earthquakes, and pretty major ones at that. Still, I suppose it’s like many other potentially catastrophic events. You can’t let fear rule your life so you judge the risk as relatively low and get on with things. Otherwise you’d never leave your home (and most accidents happen in the home anyway).

Over the past few years I’ve had a relatively painless time with all the travelling I do. Sure, I’ve had my share of delayed flights (usually from Copenhagen into London) but rarely anything more serious. The worst was dropping my keys on a plane and not realising until getting to the car park and returning to the terminal after that airline had closed up shop for the night.

However, this trip to the US and Japan seems to be making up for the good luck I’ve enjoyed over the last couple of years. (more…)

I’m now back in Japan for the summer. I arrived on Air Canada flight 1 (I suppose most airlines have a flight number 1, but I found it odd when I booked the ticket). Unfortunately, not all my luggage arrived with me. The good news is that they’ve found my missing case and it came on the same flight today, and will be delivered tomorrow (Saturday) morning. In further bad news, I broke a tooth on the flight over from Toronto (I came to Japan via a conference in Boston, so have visited Philadelphia, Boston and Toronto on the way to Japan from the UK). I’ll have to claim on the University travel insurance to get it sorted. I’m hoping they don’t have to do an extraction – that wouldn’t be a great way to start a ten week visit. I think there’s maybe enough left to cap it if nothing else. I was four hours delayed getting to Boston initially as well. It’s a good job I really enjoy coming to Japan, otheriwse this trip would be turning out rather depressing. As it is, I’m just happy to be back in Japan. (more…)

On Saturday I went to Kamakura. This is another historical power centre of Japan. Japan abounds with former major power centres. This one was particularly important in the 12th to 14th centuries when the Minamoto shoguns had it as their base (making it the military capital but not the imperial capital which was Heian-kyou (now known as Kyoto) during that period).

As with any place that was a major power centre for any length of time, it has quite a few historical sites of interest. I visited three of them, including the kotoku shrine with a Daibutsu (huge Buddha statue). (more…)

A colleague sent a link to a Japan Today article, which seemed of interest, so I followed it up. The article was indeed interesting, but one of the side-bar adverts was amusingly bizarre. It’s an “Ad by Google” and looks something like this (best I can do in WordPress to duplicate the formatting).

Hot Japan Girl
Thinking of buying?
Compare 100s
of retailers’ prices at
Shopping.com
uk.shopping.com

While heading back to the UK from Japan on Friday 28th September, I wanted to buy a bunch of last minute gifts for people here in the UK. One of the reasons for this was that I could then take them as carry-on instead of adding them to hold luggage where they’d be pushed to fit in my incredibly overweight bags (got heavily stung for excess baggage)
and would be prone to destruction by baggage handling trolls. (more…)

So, as part of my preparations for moving home, I went into the bank today to close down my account. It turns out that I really should have sorted this out a week or two ago. After I’d filled in the forms for:

• change of address to the UK
• account closure (you don’t leave a bank without an address to contact for problems even when closing the account)
• international transfer of the closing balance to my UK account,

the lady who was dealing with me went off to check up on things and came back to say that they couldn’t do an international transfer from a closing account. She suggesteed that I should transfer today’s balance and then write to them from the UK to close the account once I was sure that the transfer had gone through. I’ve dealt with banks before and that would almsot certainly leave me with a few odd yen in there and that they’d want to do something with it before closing the account. Besides, this account has a charge if it drops below a certain value and hasn’t had a sufficient payment in this month, so I really didn’t want to end up in debt in it. (more…)

My flight back to the UK will be on Friday 28th September. I’ll be at a hotel at Narita for the Thursday night (only just over a week away now). I’ve officially started to move home now, in that I’ve been packing up boxes of books for shipping back. I’ve got three boxes of books packed, with another box ready, which should take the remainder of the ones I want to ship. I’ll keep a few out of the boxes and bring them back in my luggage – reading material for between now and the flight and for the flight itself.

It’s been a wonderful adventure, which I don’t really want to end, but time marches on etc. etc. etc. This particular journey is just about at an end. More later maybe about how I feel about this sojourn, but in two words: productive, enjoyable.