Collin Condray’s Blog

Our group has been very lucky in set of experiences we will have in Japan. We have had two very unique ones recently. Last night at 11:45 PM, there was an earthquake centered on Kameoka. It ranked a 2 out of 7 on the Japanese earthquake scale. A couple of the members in the group said they heard a loud noise and the building swayed a bit. I slept right though it. Then we found out that there is a typhoon heading this way and will hit tonight sometime.

So in the face of the typhoon, we headed off to Shoyeido an incense manufacturer who has been in business for over 300 years. Shoyeido has a big factory in Kyoto where they make most of their incense by machine but we saw the handmade incense at their headquarters. We were told that there has been no loss of quality in the factory process, in fact, the people who originally made the incense by hand currently do the hand inspection of the machine made incense and say the quality is quite good.

The production of incense starts with wood such as sandalwood from India or agarwood. The wood is hand chipped from the logs before it is ground up so only the best is added in. Other spices, such as cloves, frakensense, sea shells, and other items used in Chinese medicine, are powdered and added in as well. Shoyeido imports almost all of its incense components since they can only make a tiny amount of ingredients here in Japan.

Various liquids are added to make a type of dough. The air is crushed out of dough and the dough is push through spaghetti making machine and placed on wooden boards. Craftsmen cut the incense to one size, make sure it is straight, a very important step, then dry it in a special climate control room. After drying, the incense has a final hand inspection and is then wrapped for shipping.

Our lunch meeting was with Masataka Hata the CEO of Shoyeido. He is the 12th generation of his family to hold this position. He gave us a short presentation about the history of incense in Japan. It described how Buddhist brought incense to Japan in the 6th century and over the years, the Japanese slowly altered the ingredients and manufacture of it so that it became their own. It has played a big part in Japanese life for centuries for things like perfuming of hair and in games where you have to correctly identify the type of incense by smell.

Mr. Hata was very philosophical about incense making considering it from many different perspectives. He sees burning incense as a universal process, citing its use in both Buddhism and Catholicism, and working on all five senses. The fragrance calls attention to it through its smell that makes you want to look at it and, as he put it, you can “listen to incense”

He also pointed out through his presentation that with the sense of sight, is easy to handle what direction you want to focus a smell on. However, a smell is hard to focus on one place but eventually the sense of smell eventually adapts to an ambient smell.

Mr. Hata also noted that as technology has progessed in the 20th and 21st centuries, our sensory experience has been dominated by digital audio and visual stimuli. The sense of smell has fallen behind and that there is still market opportunity to feed that sense.

Shoyeido has a plant in Colorado and Mr. Hata discussed a little about trying to market in America. Incense has long been associated with Buddhism or hippies (his word, I swear), but he wanted to expand the experience of incense to a bigger market. He believes that Japanese fragrances are very compatible with US market. So, in a smart marketing move, he uses the Japanese word for incense, koh, when discussing his product. This removes the perceived negative connotation in the US. In Japan, he uses the English word for incense to market it better.

As the typhoon was beginning to roll in, we visited Nijo Castle. It was built at the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate as a symbol of its power. The castle was deliberately built to be less than defensible. This was to show that the shogun was so powerful he could afford to show some “weakness” because he was completely unafraid of any challengers.

The castle was built with the famed nightingale floors to protect against ninja attack. There are special pins under the floor so that when you walk on it, the floor makes a chirp. When our group walked on the floor it really did sound like a small flock of birds was in the hall with us. Even though the floor was built 400 years ago, it still works just as well today. There were also various beautiful gardens around Nijo but it was a dreary day and we were drenched by the time we made it to the sword shop.

At the sword shop, Nhan bought a daisho, a beautiful set of swords with a black lacquer scabbard, blue hilt wrappings and sageo, and a black same. The photos do not do them justice. He spent $900 on both of them and another $80 for shipping. The most brave thing he did though was buy it with his girlfriend in the same room. Nhan, I salute you!

We returned to Kameoka early to get some Internet time. By the time we were finished, a lot of the places were closed including Dr. Stapp’s favorite yakimeshi (fried rice) restaurant so we went to Seiyu for dinner. Rebecca is a vegetarian so we asked for an order of yakimeshi with no meat, or at least we thought we did. Apparently, shrimp is not in meat Japan so Tim and I got a few extra shrimp.

Since we were at the Japanese Wal-Mart, we all stocked up on supplies and food for the up coming weekend. I was looking to replace a strap on a piece of carry on luggage so I split off from the group to look for one. With horribly bad Japanese I asked the saleslady if they had one. After a tortured discussion I got across what I was looking for and she got across that they didn’t have one for sale. She did remember that they had extra replacement straps behind the counter so, she gave me one. Seiyu, I thank you!

After shopping, most of us came back to play Texas hold ‘em. It was a pretty fun game but no one was really able to dominate the game. The winners of big pots kept moving around the circle but Tim, a finance major, usually had the the biggest pile.

Most of the people on this trip are still undergraduates so I was Teased terribly about being “old” especially because I wore a fanny pack. Hey! My fanny pack is incredibly useful and I can pack a lot of stuff in it…OK, I feel the same way about fanny packs, but I forgot to pack a smaller day exploration pack. The pack still works quite well for day trips and it holds a surprisingly large number of items leaving my hands free. I don’t care what it looks like I’m taking it with me.

Finally, very late, we planned what we’re going to do tomorrow with our semi-free day. We decided to go to Osaka and hopefully catch a matinee of a Bunraku, or Japanese puppet shows, try to see a sports game (soccer or baseball), go see the gadgets at Den Den Town, and see what else we can see there as well.

Tomorrow, Todiji Flea Market and Japanese puppet shows.

Today we said goodbye to our homestay families. Mine sent me off with a breakfast of curry and nan bread, a surprise for me but very tasty. Sumiko took me to the train station to meet the rest of the group. Ioku was there as well to send us off. Dr. Stapp conspired with us to give her the Banzai treatment. We surrounded her, lifted her off the ground, and threw her in the air three times and yelled “Banzai!” It was a hoot!

Then, we returned to Nagoya where we visited Kirin Beer. The Kirin Beer tour was a lot of fun. We had a great tour guide, namely Dr. Stapp, who was very, very, very enthusiastic about Kirin beer. Kirin had a nice exhibition hall where they showed how the beer was made. One section had the actual components used to make beer, the barley, hops, etc., that you could touch.

The hall overlooked the actual beer process. It was very much like the opening scene in Laverne and Shirley where all the beer comes down in rows on a conveyor belt. Kirin uses the andon system the same as Toyota and while we were there they had stopped production to fix a problem.

At the end of the tour, they had free samples of Kirin products. I had one of Kirin’s orange juice drink and a fruit drink called Amipurusu (I think that’s what it was called) which were both quite delicious. They were served with a little package of Kirin’s snack food which included a wasabe corn ball and small, dried fish with the eyes still in it which tasted, well, like fish. Now after this trip, I hope they don’t revoke my Baptist card.

On the way back from Nagoya to Kyoto I did some wartraining. I detected 6 hotspots, 4 unsecured and 2 secured, evenly divided between b and g protocols. There might have been more but the bullet train goes so fast weaker networks might not have been detected.

I also have to say again how stunning beautiful Japan is. If I didn’t know any better I’d say the almost the entire country was meticulously manicured. We passed through some low hills back to Kyoto and the fog was slowly rising off of them in the background.

Afterward dropping off our gear, a few of us went shopping at a department store near the Kyoto station. We had been in there earlier in the trip but we had arrived there just as they had closed so we didn’t see very much of it. When we returned tonight, we found that it is a much bigger place than we originally thought. They have everything there from clothes to a bookstore to an electronics store in it.

The bookstore was a little depressing. I love bookstores and I love being able to sit in them and read. To be in the presence of so many books with their form and smell and know that you can’t read any of it was frustrating. However, after wondering around I found a wall full of English books and magazines. They even had my favorite magazine, the Economist, and I finally got to catch up with what’s going on in the world.

The electronics store was a little different from American retail outlets. They had computers, software, and other gadgets just like a BestBuy. But you could also buy motherboards and cases there as well.

We returned to our hotel to work a bit and catch up before the grind starts up again tomorrow. But a maybe, we’ll play a little poker first.

Tomorrow, Shoyeido Incense, Todiji castle and its sword smith shop, and a Typhoon!

The morning started today with a huge breakfast served by the lady of the house, Sumiko. She lavished me with a huge western style breakfast. I, of course, ate way too much. I told her that she has added a pound to me. The thing that put me over the edge weight wise was the melon bread.

Over breakfast, Shinichi and I compared our experiences abroad. He said that he enjoyed working with Americans over Europeans. He found that Europeans tend to be too conservative and had trouble adapting to changing conditions.

Soon it was time to make our way to Toyota, and Shinichi, naturally, gave me a lift. During our drive we discussed his excellent English skills, and he explained that Toyota encouraged him to improve his conversation skills by paying half of the ¥600,000 tuition for a 10 week Berlitz courses. He also has to score a 720, a very high score, to pass.

Our trip also let me admire the built-in GPS system of his car. This thing is really neat. You can not only track where you’re at with a built-in map, but also use it to play the radio or a CD, check the Internet, and play movies. I would like one in my car, but I think I would be a little afraid that someone would rip it off. They’ll have to do some more camouflage work before I’ll get one.

Shinichi pointed out that our route brought us by the Toyota Technical Center, where their research is carried out. It is the home of 12,000 Toyota employees who do nothing but train and plan for the future.

Our first big event of the day was Toyota’s Motomachi plant. This plant has a dynamic production line and produces the Crown, Progres, Brevit, and Blit models of cars. The facility is huge, the size of 35 baseball fields. It employs 700 workers who, according to the current production score board above the line, were trying to make 333 cars today. When we went through they were supposed to have been up to 95 but had currently only produced 92. Each car requires 30,000 parts and 20 hours to build.

The plant had a lot of things you expect to see in an automobile manufacturing plant, parts come in, workers assemble them, and cars go out, but there are components of the plant that are not so obvious that are important.

The first, and probably most widely heard of, is the the JIT/Kanban system first developed here at Toyota. Briefly, it uses a set of card and associated boxes to make sure that only the minimum number of parts are on hand so storage area can be conserved. This system works even better because of the 200 suppliers Toyota uses; 80% are within two hours of the plant reducing response time to changing demand. Similarly, a large number of Toyota’s plants are in this area, 10 plants in this prefecture alone.

One of the things I was impressed with was the way people were valued by Toyota. They want smart and flexible workers, and they also want all workers to be inspectors to ensure quality. The manufacturing line had many robots performing various tasks. Usually, they were used for dangerous tasks or tasks that required the exact same action every time. They realize that their line workers, the people, are a source of great value. This is embodied by the slogan “harmonious interrelation of workers and facilities” which are printed and displayed on large flags within the plant.

Toyota incorporates a system of employee suggestions to improve the line. The employee tells his supervisor what changes should be made and changes are incorporated into the line. This process is called jidoka or intelligent production process. It also improves communication between workers and bosses. One of the examples we saw that was implemented was a parts storage cart mounted on a track parallel to the production line. This saves the employee from having to walk back and forth between the current car and the parts.

The other innovation is andon. It shows where problems are on the line and a color coded system of what the current status of the problem is. Green, white, or no light shows everything is OK, yellow indicates a need for parts, and red means out of parts. There is also a line stop system and call switch. Whenever there is a big problem, a worker or manager can stop the line. A tone sounds to identify the problem and where it was for the manager, so he can come and get the problem resolved.

There were quite a few musical tones coming from the floor. One of the robotic stations that added a part to the car was actually playing “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” The song was played to warn workers away from all the potentially dangerous action that was going on in the area.

Each car has a large card attached under the hood with instructions on what to do on the mixed production line. The code is a sequence of numbers and letters which tells what goes where and in which order. A car’s location on the line is tracked through a box on top of the cars, which beams the current position of the car to the robots that are assembling it. It was all very impressive.

Toyota has a tour set up in their home office to showcase their latest technologies. Some of the more visually dynamic displays were the ones involving holograms. The holographic car body would disappear to display the various actions of the engines and other systems of the automobiles. They also had several of their latest models on display so we could get in, feel the seats, flip the switches, play with the multimedia GPS systems, and turn all the dials. I’m not a big SUV or hybrid engine fan, but they had a smaller one there that I really liked. Maybe someday I’ll have to get one.

After the showroom, we had lunch with a few Toyota executives for a question and answer session. It was a very interesting time. Some of the questions and other topics that came up were:

What is the current state of hybrid engine technology?
It is still in its infancy. It will not completely replace gasoline-only engines but will be a complement to them.

What do you do about outsourcing issues in the US?
Toyota’s JIT system works best when cars are built where they’re sold. Toyota will still build plants in the US because Americans buy them. For example, a new truck plant was recently built in Texas, a large market for trucks.

What are your current market goals? Does Toyota plan to move up from its 3rd place standing?
Toyota is looking for a 15% global market share, up from 10%, to put it into second place. Automobile technology is not Toyota’s core competency; the production system is what’s important.

Why spend resources on Formula 1 race cars?
This shows that Toyota is an exciting company willing to work on high visibility, high performance cars. This also lets them see how engines perform at high levels so they can learn something new about engine performance.

A few other tidbits that we learned were about the hybrid cars. They are much more intelligent now that they have several years worth of actual on road experience to draw on. One of the executives said that he didn’t like the earlier models, but the new models were redesigned with a smarter power source switching mechanism. There is a completely different hybrid engine in the Prius now.

When Japanese companies hire, they don’t look to see what you’ve done like they do with American Companies. They look for people who work in teams and have challenging spirit.

One of the concepts Toyota has is genchi gemba, or each place has its own tools. There is no common tool box.

One of the executives whom I found most interesting was Ron Haigh, a Canadian expat. He moved here 14 years ago with a degree in English literature. He came to Japan on a lark because at the time, the Canadian economy was in bad shape. He began working as a translator and English instructor for Toyota. Eventually, he worked his way into public relations where he’s been ever since. He joined us for the Denso tour and was just as enthusiastic as we were about finding out what was going on.

We left Toyota with a ton of literature and little presents from Toyota: key chains, pens, notepads, etc. Unlike many of the businesses we’ve toured, we didn’t get any free Toyota car samples.

Then it was off to Denso. Denso is a parts manufacturer for various auto manufacturers not only in Japan but for other countries. They primarily make dashboard parts (called clusters), fuel gauges, speedometers, GPS system, etc. Bar code readers and robots are some of the other products they make. The plant in Takatana employs 2,700 workers.

Like Toyota, this plant tour started off with a display showing everything Denso makes. One of the things that we saw was a precision robotic arm. They had mounted four mechanical pencils with their tips pointing up. The robot arm gripped a pencil lead and quickly put the lead into the tip, removed the lead, moved to the side and quickly moved the lead back into the tip. None of us who viewed it could believe the precision.

The Denso line had many of the similarities of the Toyota line. There was the current board, a problem station board, andon, etc. There were many more robots working here though, 50 in total. The first thing that people were the most intimately involved in was inspection. All parts are inspected by hand and are tested for 8 to 30 minutes to find defects. People also do a lot of the work on combination clusters.

Denso uses the CKD packing process, or complete lock down process, used to package the parts made in this plant destined for other countries. This allows their customers in Asia, who might not be as skilled as the Japanese, to quickly get Denso parts into production in their overseas factories.

The lines eliminate the need for part molds by using lasers to cut the various parts. This gives the line the ability to produce many different things made in one line without changing the mold, a costly process.

A training center is also built into the factory. There are five different classes given: environmental, safety, operations, defect detection, and quality. One of the rooms was a QC room, or quality circle. Our explanation of what they did in there was much like the description of a Saturday Wal-Mart meeting. This and all the other processes are elements of the concept of kaizen, or efficient factory.

Our question and answer session did not go as well here probably because we had a translator between us and the executives. I think that the question that I asked got mangled because the answer I got back didn’t make any sense. I did collect a few interesting facts. Denso tries not to play favorites by not having a keiretsu, a Japanese term for business arrangements similar to a monopoly. They have a reputation for being a fair player to everyone.

In foreign expansion, Denso likes to own 100% of new investments, but they will joint venture with foreign firms if their quality is good.

Dinner was of yaki miku, it kind of reminded me of a cross between a fondue party and indoor grilling. After dinner I mostly talked with the parents of the house. We talked about many things including business, places in America, and gadgets. I also showed them our Halloween party pictures. They also lavished me with presents before leaving. Shinichi, Sumiko, you are always welcome at my house!

Tomorrow, Kirin Beer.

Its off to Toyota City today via the shinkansen, the famed bullet train, which was a lot of fun. The ride was very smooth, but we didn’t go the full speed of the train because the track was relatively twisty. When we go to Tokyo, we should go full speed.

I’m now at the point of traveling in Japan where I don’t care what I pack. I think I can make it for two nights with 2 pair of underwear, 3 socks, a t-shirt with a hole in it, a pair of jeans, my contact lens case, and as always all my computer gear. I did find a neat website before I left for Japan that has advice on how to travel with one bag, www.oratory.com/onebag/. I picked up a few ideas from it, but I wished I had picked up more. If you want to travel light, make sure you check it out.

We were picked up in Tokyo by members of the Language Society for English (LSE), a group of volunteers who teach English to adults who might not have learned English in school. The society is led by a lady named Ioku who is just like every older southern lady I have ever met. She had boundless energy and was constantly working to make sure everything was in their proper place and everybody knew what they were supposed to do. We were joined by her bubbly friend Ishiguro, who is a complete hoot. She brought a huge sense of fun to our day.

The first stop we made in Toyota after stowing our gear was the Hatcho Miso factory. The buildings and equipment they use to make miso reminded me a lot of wineries in Altus, Arkansas. Our tour showed us how they made miso back a few hundred years ago. The miso is still made the same way today, but packaged using modern methods. To make miso, six tons of soy beans are poured into a large, iron bound vat. Then, three tons of rock are piled on top. The beans are left to ferment for two winters and two summers before it becomes miso. When they want to reuse a vat, they don’t clean it out. They leave the miso residue on the sides of the vat until they’re ready to use it so the wood remains damp, keeping it from cracking.

At the end of the tour, we got to try many miso based products. There were three types available for testing. The first and the second were very similar, the first having a stronger taste than the second. The third had an aftertaste that was OK, but not as good as the first two. The highlight of the tour was the miso soft-serve ice cream. It was fabulous. Everyone was saying, “I can’t believe this is miso ice cream!” It tasted much like vanilla but had a nice tang to it. I highly recommend it.

We returned to Ioku’s house to watch a little sumo before dinner. Again it was just like every southern lady’s house except the tables were a little lower, and there were no chairs in the main room. There was enough food for everyone, and it just appeared, like it came from out of nowhere. Ioku made sure that everyone was taken care of and made time to teach people how to make various parts of the upcoming Japanese dinner.

Watching sumo was a good time and surprisingly educational. Before the bouts, they flash on TV who the wrestlers are and what their records are. I relearned how to read the kanji for numbers by reading the wrestlers’ current wins and losses. Now, if I could just learn how to write them.

The main event for the day was the banquet for us, the guests of honor, where we would meet our homestay families. We introduced ourselves and our hosts introduced themselves to us in English from the youngest to the oldest. There were approximately a million kids running around, and they were all very cute.

Then we ate Japanese potluck. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much sushi in one place. I tried as much of it as I could. The sushi was good but I think I liked the salmon the best. I don’t know what was on top of it and I don’t care, it was very good.

Dr. Stapp made a presentation to the LSE of an Arkansas flag. I made the mistake of explaining the various parts of the Arkansas flag to Ioku. Of course, she made me explain it again to the entire group. I think I will have my revenge, though, by teaching her students how to say “y’all.”

I stayed with a wonderful homestay family, the Mukoda’s. Shinichi, the father, is employed by Toyota and oversees 700 workers developing for suspension systems and other components for Formula One race cars. I presented them some gifts from America and a few from Arkansas specifically. Many of the gifts that I brought were food, but the gift that they seemed to like the most were some homemade cards that were made by Kathleen. They had close-up pictures of flowers attached to the front of the card and they are quite beautiful. Way to go sweetie!

Tomorrow, a tour of Toyota and Denso.

Today is pottery day. We got hit with a rainstorm as we made our way about 7 or 8 minutes away from our hotel to Sensei Nishijima pottery studio. Nishijima is a highly rated potter in Japan. He began when he was 20 years old and has been making pottery for 35 years. He showed us around his studio today and how to make pottery. I decided on an artistically lumpy cup and 3 somewhat asymmetrical serving bowls. And just so you know, they are supposed to look like that. A lot of people made animals, and I was going to make a Linux penguin but someone beat me to it. Maybe I can swipe it from Tim when he’s not looking. Nishijima also had a very compact garden between his house and studio which I snapped a few pictures of.

Lunch was at a Kameoka restaurant where Dr. Stapp learned how to cook fried rice. I didn’t have fried rice, but I had ramen dai, or a big bowl of Chinese noodles. It’s called ramen but its not like the stuff in the US. It’s much, much tastier.

In the afternoon, we went to the Kyoto Budo Center. They’ve got almost every Japanese martial art there. We just missed a kyudo (bow) tournament and saw the final bout of a sumo competition. An iaido tournament was still going strong though. I met an American, David Brier, who is a teacher at a school for Japanese students returning from abroad.

He and his son, who is a student at a local university, practice iaido here. He explained a little about the tournament. We saw several people performing some standard kata, then they switched to their own styles. It was a great event to watch. They do this every Saturday and Sunday, so I will have to come back again. If you’re out there Sensei Brier, thanks!

Also at the Budo Center they have Karate, Kendo, Aikido and Jujitsu but we didn’t have time to see them.

There are 3 martial arts stores near the budo center that support the practitioners. I’m glad I had a handkerchief, because I was drooling at the gear, and also glad that they don’t take MasterCard.

Across the street from the budo center is the Kyoto Handicraft Center. It’s a very tourist oriented shop with special discounts for foreigners. They had your standard tourist stuff (t-shirts, fans, samurai swords, etc.), but I only bought a little samurai sword letter opener. I decided to wait until after visiting the Toji flea market (and after my friends let me know what they want, hint, hint) to buy anything substantial.

Dinner was at a bakery at Kyoto Station. I got a cheese roll and a piece of melon bread. It had a very soft melon taste to it that I enjoyed very much. When I got back to Kameoka, I went to Seiyu to complete dinner with a salad and some fruit. Wal-Mart owns 37% of Seiyu. You can definitely see their mark with the ‘Roll Back’ signs. They also have a big container of sushi for about ¥550, and I’m really itching to buy it to see if it’s any good.

The day ended with some catch up things like laundry, journal writing, some research on Toyota, and packing 3 days worth of clothes and homestay gifts into a small bag.

Tomorrow, Toyota City and our first homestay.

Our day started off with a traditional Japanese breakfast at the hotel in our yucata robes. It was very different from breakfast in America, very vegetable heavy. I also think this is the first time that I’ve ever had tuna for breakfast. It was great!

Next, we returned to the pagoda and the romantic pond we saw last night. In the day, the Nara deer come out, and they are hungry. Don’t turn your back on them, or they may try to take a nip out of you. For ¥150, you can buy little deer treats, and I’m told they don’t taste half bad.

Todaiji, or “large eastern temple,” was our first planned stop of the day. It is a Buddhist temple built by missionaries who studied in China. Dr. Stapp arranged through an old friend to have a special tour given to us by one of the monks.

He provided us close access to the main statues of Buddha and the Bodhisattvas. The main statue was huge. As an example of the scale, the ears are 3 meters tall, and each of the individual hair parts is the size of a basketball. Supposedly there are 32 differences between Buddha and normal people, such as webbing between the fingers of the hand, and are reflected in this statue. One of our members asked our guide why he was a monk. His response was because his parents were monks.

Lunch was not a success today: katsudo, a bowl of rice topped with pork cutlets and runny eggs. I tried it but needless to say, my palate is not optimized for runny eggs. Lunch was not a total loss, as I had more green tea ice cream for dessert.

The second scheduled stop today was Kasuga Shrine. There are over 5000 stone lamps around it, making it look like a forest of stone lamps. Each of the lamps has been added to the shrine over its long life. Some had been recent donations but others had been there for several centuries.

At the shrine, we had our fortunes read. Mine was moderate good fortune. Only one person received a bad fortune.

We returned to Kyoto and had a blast. After dropping off our Nara gear, we hung out at the Kyoto train station. I spent about ¥950 on a huge plate of sushi that was pretty good. The station was also hosting an a cappella pop song contest in this huge amphitheater built into the side of the station. At the top of the station is an observation deck where you can see a large hunk of the city. The windows at the top of the station were dirty, so none of my pictures turned out very well, but you can get an idea of the enormous scale of the city.

Today’s Japanese lesson is “kochi sosama.” It is what you say after leaving a restaurant, but not after leaving a grocery store or clothes store.

Tomorrow, pottery and budo.

Our destination today is Nara, the old capital of Japan. We are going to visit Sharp Corporation and take in the sights. I have ensured that our weather will be good because I’ve brought my jacket and other unnecessary crap.

The train drive from Kyoto to Nara is about 45 minutes, so I decided to do a bit of wardriving (warriding, wartraining?). From the train using Net Stumbler, I was able to detect 9 wireless hot spots, over half of them were unsecured. Unfortunately, we went by so fast I didn’t have time to connect.

I think part of the reason I couldn’t make it connect comes from my crappy NetGear WG511 card (Google, please archive this extremely negative review for the entire world to read, thank you very much). It has got this piece of crap software that’s on its third or fourth revision that goes along with it, and it has a real hard time connecting to unsecured networks. I have yet to make the software that came with this card connect to any encrypted network. You put the settings in, and nothing happens. To make it connect to an encrypted network, you have to go to the Windows network settings, tell it to let Windows manage the networks, and then input all the WEP settings there, even though the documentation specifically says don’t do this. It’s really an awful card. If you’re reading this NetGear, you owe me a decent card.

Now that that’s out of my system, back to Nara. We stopped for lunch and an impromptu Japanese language course from E-chan, one of Dr. Stapp’s Japanese friends. I learned how to order something, you say the name of the thing you want and then “onegashimasu.” Today was subuta, a sweet and sour pork which was good but the pork had a strange aftertaste that I couldn’t identify. Afterwards, I learned how to say it was delicious-”oshii desu.”

Nara was beautiful today. The sky was clear, and you could see the hills that surround Nara. They are quite different than the Ozark Mountains that I’m used to. They are much steeper and are not as smooth.

On the way to Sharp Corporation, Tim struck up a conversation with a college kid who was going for an interview with Sharp. He was very nervous, but we tried to help him as best we could. We peppered him with some sample questions and made sure his tie was tied correctly and his collar was turned down. Good luck guy!

Everybody here wears a black suit and white shirt for work. The only difference is the tie and what color the stripes on it are.

Sharp was a pretty neat place. We were shown their hall of history by our tour guide Nigata-san. The company was founded by Tokuji Hayakawa in 1925. On display were a lot of the old products that they had produced at one time. Among the things they have produced:

1915-Mechanical pencils
1920-Crystal radios (from reversed engineered foreign radios)
1940-B&W TVs
1958-Air conditioners, portable radios, home appliances
1960-Color TV
1962-Restaurant microwave ovens
1964-Electric calculators,
1980-Stereos, VCRs, Boom boxes
1981-Japanese-English translator
1987-PDAs
1990′s- pioneered cameras in phones, provided solar cells for Japan space program

We got to see a lot of their latest stuff, too, including:

60″ LCD displays in their halls
802.11b wireless TV that is good for up to 30m. I didn’t think that the b network had enough bandwidth to do that.
2 Mega pixel phone cam
360 deg surveillance motion activated camera
Zaurus PDA running Linux. Woo woo!

We were also shown how LCDs work. We saw a little informational video, but the coolest part was the little bottle of the liquid crystal they passed around. It looks a lot like milk, but it felt heavier.

Finally, we got to see one of their future products: light, thin, low power consumption transistors made of mother’s glass, 3000 times smoother than regular glass. Yeah, it didn’t make much sense to me either.

If you’ll take a look at some of the pictures in the gallery, you can see some of the Sharp dorms that are located on the Sharp Corporation campus. They encourage their employees to live right next to where they work and have other built in amenities like an on campus shrine. If you’ll take a close look at the dorms you’ll also see several cracks in them. Those are the results of earthquakes.

Our hotel in Nara was great. It was a traditional hotel that did not allow shoes in the building and required you to change to slippers at the door. They also required you to change into special bathroom slippers when you went in there. They really like it clean.

Before dinner we previewed some of the sights we’re going to see tomorrow, a pond that was featured prominently in romantic literature when the emperor ruled here and a large pagoda dominating the Nara skyline. It was dramatically lit up but none of my photos were very good. Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll get better ones.

We finished the day with yakitori. I never got an exact translation, but I guess it’s a lot like a cross between Spanish tapas (appetizers) and an all you can eat steak place. You have to sit cross-legged at a low table, and naturally, we were seated next to a group that was smoking.

For added excitement, we watched a group of about 25 college kids get drunk and begin to pass out at the table behind us. We called the hogs in response. I think it encouraged them; a couple of them came over and danced some Michael Jackson dances. Remember, people like these are the reason that he can get off.

After yakitori, we wandered around for a while until midnight or so. There were still a lot of people in business suits with briefcases, presumably who had just gotten off work. It was kind of sad.

Tomorrow, Nara up close.