想い出は遠くの日々

Another week passes in Japan and I’ve been here for over two months now. Last week was sorta interesting… let me recall.

Thursday night was a “farewell party” for one of the people in my group. Although, on a side note, my coworker is moving to another department… just to another cubicle on the same floor 20 metres from the original position. Anyway, the evening’s event consisted of Shabu-Shabu at a nice restaurant near Kichijoji station. Some of you might be wondering what Shabu-Shabu is, it’s basically hot-pot in Canada. I can’t find any significant difference between this and what I usually do in Canada. Oh, that night, I’ve been asked at least five times, by five different people in my group, if I had tried Shabu-Shabu before… each time, I gave the same answer: we have something similar in Canada, it’s called hot pot.

Nonetheless, the rest of the evening was awesome. Since it was Nomihoudai (all you can drink, or some of my coworkers put it: free-flowing drinks), I helped myself to the various alcoholic beverages they had on the menu. Last time, recall that I drank only beer. This time, I was more adventurous and I ended up ordering up different non-beer beverages. Among them, I took a real liking to Japanese Umeshu (plum wine). That stuff is totally awesome… I mean, it makes beer look bad. I’ll be looking forward to drinking more of that stuff in future Nomihoudai’s.

As the evening wore on, and as everyone drank more, the topic of slangs came up for some reason… well, I just don’t recall how we got there. I was taught various Japanese sayings and the only one I recall right now is Nandeyane (translated literally, ‘what the hell?’), followed by hitting your conversation partner on the chest with the back of your hand. This should be used if and only if the situation is casual.

Some of my coworkers got the bright idea that I should use that during my midterm progress presentation as an icebreaker… my group leader (ie, my boss’ boss), Mizuno-san shot me a look of fear that basically said “Don’t you dare use that”, and Okamoto-san gave me the same look. I figured it was a bad idea… so I began to explain to my coworkers the probable situation if I used Nandeyane in my formal presentation…

Me: You know, it’s probably not such a good idea to use such a phrase in my presentation. I mean, with all the important people attending like the laboratory director, our project manager… I’m sure it’s amusing for you guys to watch me say this but… you know, I do LIKE to LIVE. I did sorta promised my parents to ummm… …keep safe and this is uhh… you know… certain death?

Them: But I think it’s funny.

Me: Right. I’m sure people will get a kick out of it but… Mizuno-san and Okamoto-san will turn a nice shade of white the moment those words leave my mouth.

Okamoto-san: If you say this during your presentation, I will SO get fired.

Me: You see, I don’t like to covet death… I’m sure it’s interesting to watch but you know… the certain death part is not good?

It’s probably safer to use Yo-momma jokes in my presentation… at least there’s a chance that the people won’t understand it.

Zipping by… Friday night, I took part in playing Futsal (think soccer but with 5 people and a very small field) against Sun Microsystems with some people on my office floor. It was basically a showdown between NTT and Sun Micro. The Sun team was far more experienced in playing Futsal than us, but we had more people on the team. To put it in short, in the first half of the game, they scored numerous times on us. But since we had more people, we had a better rotation and thus, near the end, we were scoring well due to attrition. I didn’t find out the score at the end… I guess having fun was more important. After the game, I hung out with my team and afterwards, went home.

Saturday… nothing happened in the morning or the afternoon. I went to Akihabara in the afternoon to get a camera pouch for my (now) scratched up digital camera. In the evening, I met up with a bunch of CJP peeps to watch fireworks in Asakusa. We got some pretty decent front row seats of fireworks viewing… I’ll let the pictures do the talking…

Sunday… I had to sleep in… a complete write-off day.

I think that’s all I have to say for now… this post is getting exceedingly long and the CJP peeps won’t appreciate having this crowd the RSS agregator.

I guess it’s another time for an update…

Let’s start this with the events that happened on the weekdays of last week.

Basically, work is the same as last week… the only thing of significance work-wise is my project proposal presentation for my coworkers. Since I’m at a stage where I’ve basically exhausted the first phase of my research project, my team has asked me to come up with ideas on how to use the results of the first phase to create an actual product/prototype. All in all, I think the presentation went pretty well because I was allowed to fully use my English capabilities (ie, speak normally) and I was basically in familiar waters doing normal English presentations.

Recall that my new supervisor, Okamoto-san, is the captain of the flower arrangement (Ikebana) club. On Thursday, I joined him at lunch to do some flower arranging. The goal of Ikebana is to fully replicate the model arrangement made by the Ikebana sensei (teacher). At first, I decided to just watch Okamoto-san arrange flowers but… another member of the flower arrangement club let me actually arrange some flowers that day using his flowers. I guess this a good opportunity to introduce another member of my work team… on the pictures below; the person beside me (and pointing out where I should place the flowers) is Suzuki-san. He’s another very cool guy that I work with… Okamoto-san and Suzuki-san are the only male members of the Ikebana club… but I think it’s mighty impressive for them to do this… and I also think that it’s a very good way of feeling more in tune with Japanese culture.

I guess when people first hear about Ikebana, they might consider this activity trivial. However, I assure you that this is not an easy feat to master. Even with the model in front of me, I can’t even make a replica that is of some resemblance to the master copy.

After some significant guidance from Suzuki-san, I was able to make an arrangement with some remote resemblance to the teacher’s model. Then we called the teacher for judgement… and using my primitive Japanese listening skills, I was able to figure out that I messed up… well, not too badly… the teacher only rearranged about half the flowers…

I think even though the teacher’s model is very pretty and balanced, however, I think my model is okay too. Perhaps my flower arrangement is a reflection of myself in Japan: it’s not perfect but surely, it’s improving along the way.

I usually post up new material on Monday night but this week is a bit special.

This weekend was a long weekend with Monday being Marine Day (海の日). It would be a waste if I didn’t exploit the weekend for travelling, so I went to Kyoto to visit my friends down in the Kansai region (recall that last time, I went to Kyoto with my former supervisor). And also this weekend, there is a huge festival in Kyoto called the Gion Matsuri. Don’t ask me about the history of the festival but all I can say is that this festival is one of the largest held in Japan.

So, on Friday night, I left work and hopped on the Shinkansen heading towards Kyoto. Many CJP people from the Kantou (Tokyo and nearby) region were taking night buses to Kyoto and arriving Saturday morning. But last week, I had some stomach problems (more on this later on), so I chickened out and spill the money for the bullet train. My bullet train roundtrip ticket worked out to be about 3 times as much as the night bus but I end up saving 6 hours of time (and suffering). Since I was still recovering from my stomach issues, I could only buy mixed sandwiches for my train ride.

Fast forward two and a half hours on the train and I arrived at Kyoto. I met up with Anton and Brett (which everyone seems to call him Link) at Kyoto station and we proceeded to get some food at a nearby Izakaya (Japanese bar). Anton seems to be quite familiar with the Master of the bar and he ended up asking the Master for the Gaijin book so I could sign it. I ended up drawing a skewd picture of Canada, an igloo, and a polar bear drinking Labatt blue in the igloo. Suffice to say, my map of Canada looked more like China. I’ll let Anton’s blog cover more of the other details of that night. Afterwards, we headed to Anton’s place (where I crashed for the weekend). Anton and Brett showed me their yukata’s (traditional Japanese clothes) and I was compelled to get one for myself. That way, I could look cool for the festival. I’ll take this moment to thank Anton for letting me crash at his place… he’s a totally cool guy.

On Saturday morning, I decided that I needed a yukata for the festival so we spent the day shopping around for one. Throughout the day, the people from Kantou arrived from their night bus trips and joined us. The other CJP people needed yukatas too, so we all ended up shopping for one. Everyone finally got their yukatas in the afternoon and we were ready for the festivities…

I’ll let the pictures and their captions do the talking…

Since everyone was crashing over at Anton’s place, the sleeping arrangements were a bit… dense…

I ended up sleeping in the tatami room with just a pillow… compared to the futon room (which also has an air conditioning unit), this had the least comfort. Anyways, the sleeping arrangement worked out like this… Me, Neil and Brett were in the same room. I spent a bit of time to draw this up…

So, everyone slept… with Clement snoring in the futon room . In the middle of the night, I got really cold from the air conditioner because it was set to a very low temperature. The rooms were seperated by a sliding door so the cold was passing through there. Since the remote the hidden somewhere deep in the other room (the futon room), I decided that by closing the sliding door between the two, I could stop the cold wind from entering… it worked well but…

I forgot that by closing the door, the a/c would continue to generate cold air the in the futon room. And the peeps in the futon room would basically freeze… however, I thought through that scenerio and deducted that the people in the room would find the remote eventually and turn off the a/c. But that was not to be…

Later on that night, I was heard some loud snoring in my room. I was rather puzzled by this fact because only Clement snored and he’s in the (now freezing) futon room. To my surprise, I discovered he was sleeping beside me! The dude decided to leave the comfortable futon room to sleep in the tatami room because of the cold.

Anyways, to put it short… I owe the guys in the futon room an apology… sorry about that Victor, Vincent, and Kelvin.

Sunday night was basically the same thing except we explored a different part of the festival.

Monday morning was the parade but it was raining real hard so we couldn’t do much.

Everyone parted ways on Monday afternoon and I hopped back on my Shinkansen to Tokyo in the evening. And that’s my second Kyoto trip in a nutshell.

Some people have mentioned that my hair is getting quite long…

I agree… I’ve been meaning to get a haircut over here in Japan. Unlike Canada though, I simply don’t know the language for getting a haircut. I mean, in Canada, you could preempt the barber from screwing up your hair but over here in Japan (with my retarded Japanese ability), it’s a whole new ballgame. So, I guess you know what this post is going to be about… so here goes…

My long and shaggy hair has been bothering me for the past couple of weeks… I mean, it’s getting long and to avoid getting poked in the eye by my own hair, I have to comb a hair-split. That worked for awhile but as my hair grew longer, it was getting quite unruly to maintain it. By the time I get to work, my hair is this disparate mess that I have to fix before my coworkers arrive, lest I alarm them. Even with hairspray, it was a stop gap measure to delay the inevitable haircut.

So, last week at work, I spent a lot of time researching on how to get a decent haircut in Japan. I searched the internet, ask my friends, and even asked my coworkers. My criteria was basically for the barber to understand the word “Trim” or its Japanese equivalent.

I got a wide range of opinions on where I should get a haircut.

Some of my coworkers told me I should go to Roppongi where there’s a safe bet that there would be English speaking barbers. But from my previous visit to Roppongi, I knew that would set me back about 6000 yen at least to get a very simple haircut. But this option is probably the safest one of them all.

Other coworkers suggested that I should go to the train station to get a haircut. They say it’s a very cheap way of getting a haircut. Here’s an aside: over the past month I’ve been in Japan, I did in fact notice that there are barber shops in train stations for a very low price of 1000 yen. BUT, there’s a catch. 1000 yen for 10 minutes of haircutting. I’ve ran through all the possible endings for this option and I’ve concluded the chances of getting an okay haircut is marginal at best. I mean, how can you get a decent haircut in just a mere 10 minutes (aside from going bald)?

One innovative suggestion was to bring a picture of myself with short hair and attempt to explain to them that I want the same hairdo.

So, there we have the two extremes… I’m basically trading safety vs price.

Anyway, fast forward to the weekend. I’ve decided that Saturday was judgement day and it was time for my haircut. From my old supervisor (Shiraga-san), I’ve heard that he gets his haircut near the Shin-Tokorozawa train station… and by looking at his hair, I think that barber must have done a pretty decent job.

After walking around for awhile, I selected this decent looking shop that provided haircuts at a reasonable price of 2000 yen. I mean, as long as there’s no time limit, I think nothing really bad is going to happen.

Into the shop I go… carrying a picture of myself with short hair…

When it was my turn to get a haircut, I made sure that I declared that I was a foreigner who was bad at Japanese… and I want hair that looked like my picture.

Me: Watashi wa gaikokujin desu. Kono sasshin no kami onaji kiiru dekimasu ka? (this picture’s hair, same, cut-able?)
Barber: Hai… hai…

*snip* *snip* *snip* … and without the use of a buzz shaver… the barber used scissors all the way.

30 minutes later… I’ve left with short hair. And boy am I relieved and impressed…

Give me a moment to recall what happened last week at work…

As they say in Canada: another day, another dollar
Here in Japan, it’s: another day, another yen

Sorry for the lack of pictures in advance… things aren’t as spectacular as they used to be.

I’m (still) spinning out my work at NTT at an accelerated rate which probably quite distressful to my coworkers because I’m causing them to do more work in an earlier timeframe.

But I digress… over here in Japan, I’m accumulating quite a bit of experience that will be useful for my last co-op term at Waterloo. It is often difficult to find an R&D job in Canada much less a PURE R&D position where you don’t work on a product line.

I’ll spend the rest of the post putting up some neat facts about my life at the NTT Musashino Lab (I’ll be checking over my post over again to make sure that I don’t post any conflict of interest items).

– I always have a fun time at lunch… mostly because of the huge variety of food available from the TWO cafeterias in the lab. I’ve basically made it my mission to make my primary diet fish and rice. So far, I have never been disappointed with the quality of the food there. It brings food services anywhere in Canada to shame.

– there are many drinks that I could buy from the vending machines on my floor but I have taken quite a liking to this beverage called “Sukkiri Orange Natchan”… it makes me smile just by looking at the can.

– some of you in Canada might recall that on my last co-op term, I have a medium steeped tea and a butter croissant every morning. Over here in Japan, I have replaced the medium steeped tea with a cold “Starbucks Seattle Latte” (btw, which is more like a melted iced cappicino) and the butter croissant with custard bread for the low low price of 350 yen at 7-11.