Sat 6 Jan 2007
The nearest JR line station to Meiji University Central Campus is Ochanomizu. O-chya is tea (as in char), no is a possessive, and mizu means cold water. Ochanomizu therefore means cold water for making tea. I asked Murata-sensei and he confirmed that the station is near the site of the fortified Imperial Palace area which had a spring used for making tea.
Fri 5 Jan 2007
Well, I’m sitting here in the Ikuta guest house in Kawasaki city – a suburb of Tokyo where Meiji University has one of its three campuses. Unfortunately, I’m not working at the nearby Ikuta campus, but at the central Tokyo one. My host is collecting me at lunchtime tomorrow and showing me where to go. The University is closed until Tuesday (the university observes a long Christmas/New Year holiday and then Monday is a public holiday in Japan) but he’s going to show me where things are and introduce me to the head of his unit and a few of the grad students who’ll be in as well.
I didn’t get much sleep the night before flying out. I hate morning flights. My Mother took me to Heathrow. We had been planning on grabbing a coffee together after I checked in but there was a horrendous-looking line to get into the security checkpoint area (after which there’s another long line for the scanning itself) so we joined the back of the line straightaway after checking in. There was no problem with the luggage I’d brought (despite it being 70% more than the luggage allowance). The queue wasn’t too bad, as it turned out. It kept moving and we were only waiting in it for fifteen minutes. So I said goodbye to Mum at that point and headed into the departure lounge with plenty of time. There were no delays or problems with the flights and I managed to buy an upgrade with frequent flier points from Copenhagen to Narita. I still didn’t get much sleep on the plane despite this, but at least
it was more comfortable and better food. So, I arrived pretty much on time at Narita and waited an age for my luggage, but it came through OK.