You know you should stop when you can’t think of titles

Three long days – I’ll keep it short. 

Up early on Monday to pack and leave the hotel by about 6:15.  The trick was packing so that the suitcase could be sent to my next hotel in Tokyo while I went to Osaka for a night.  I met my colleague on the shinkansen platform; we bought breakfast and boarded.  The window seat did me little good, because I was more interested in sleeping than in catching the early morning sun.  In about three hours that thanks to a lack of consciousness seemed like a lot less we had arrived; two changes later we were rumbling on a local train to the Osaka main office. 

At the office we discussed the upcoming demonstration, then after a lunch at a family restaurant where I surprised everyone by having no more than a salad but then following it up with a large helping of ice cream we drove to the customer site.  The visit proved frustrating and there were moments where I had to struggle to contain my impatience and anger.  I can’t understand the reasoning behind giving an unknown sample that has never been characterised to a vendor for a demo measurement.  Whatever the results, you can’t compare them; you don’t know what to expect; it almost always turns out to be a colossal waste of time.  In our case it would have been a total waste of time had I not decided in a moment of irritation to measure a standard sample I’d brought along which allowed us to demonstrate that even in an environment acoustically dominated by pumps and fans we were able to measure a 1.8 nm high step with the system that’s not designed for high resolution.  The customer samples indicated more about their level of knowledge of those samples than anything else, with almost all of them exhibiting characteristics an order of magnitude different from what had been indicated.  It was about eight when we returned to the office. 

We went straight for dinner at Namba station, picking initially a restaurant called Watami but after being informed of a 20-minute wait decided to pick the restaurant a floor higher instead, called En.  There we had all manner of tasty food, after moving to another room because the head of the Osaka office didn’t like the noisy neighbors.  The restaurant had some trouble with delivering the food quickly, and the tuna cheek in the end never appeared, but after tofu skin and spinach salad, natto and ground meat on cabbage leaves, fried mozzarella in tofu skin, tofu boiled in soy milk with tororo kombu and ponzu, grilled onigiri, salmon and avocado sushi, hot sake, Perrier, and walnut ice cream I left stuffed and happy.  I have to admit that liking the natto while one of the Japanese almost spat it out made me feel a winner, but if it was indeed his second time ever then he deserves praise for his courage.  He got extra tamagoyaki to make up for it. 

My colleague from Tokyo and I stayed at the Toyoko Inn at Namba station.  I was tired, hence the lack of blogging activity.  As always, this Toyoko Inn resembled any Toyoko Inn, except that they served croissants and cinnamon rolls for breakfast. 

We visited an existing customer on Tuesday, who I was afraid had bought the instrument without really knowing anything, but it turned out that he had a good grasp of the technology and the theory and simply hadn’t ever gotten around to using the system.  I hope the meeting with him gets him kick-started.  He did say that seeing the system he thought he’d manage with the more complex measuring modes, which is a change from the questions we’d received.  Sometimes I wonder how much gets lost in transmission when a customer writes in Japanese and I end up getting a translated message – it’s like Chinese whispers with translation issues thrown in.  Even so, with the meeting beginning at 2pm in Kobe, a three-hour meeting meant leaving on a seven o’clock train from Shin-Osaka and arriving in Tokyo main station at 10pm.  I only bought a small dinner at the train station because I’d had a large miso “here” (filet) tonkatsu (pork cut, batter-fried) set menu for lunch.  Again, I dozed for quite a bit, though I also read from David Malouf’s short story collection “Antipodes,” which I don’t know how to pronounce, so I’ll go look it up now.  Be right back. 

It’s what I feared it might be, another example of English pronounciation gone haywire.  Learners of the German language get frustrated with the vowel changes from singular to plural, but at least one can still recognize the connection between the two. 

On both the visits recounted above there were the same four of us: my Tokyo colleague, an Osaka salesman relatively new to the company but who looks the part and seems sharp enough to pick up on the instrument skills, and the assistant who lived in Canada in her youth and translates for me when necessary.  It sounds like a lot of manpower, but I welcome any exposure to our systems.  I noticed that the assistant sat up right at all meals, so I asked her if she did sports.  I thought she might have had ballet or other dance lessons, and I wasn’t far off: she does yoga.  Another thing I noticed was how the corners of her mouth are always turned slightly upward as if her lips were spring-loaded to smile, and she does smile a lot, so it’s hard to tell whether her disposition influenced her features or if they were created to suit her disposition. 

Anyway, after the ride home and the antipodes I got to my hotel in Ikebukuro, which turned out to be located on a pedestrian zone in a movie district, with – at that hour – terminally fashionable guys guiding their equally fashionable girls by the buttocks while a few hundred meters away in the Ikebukuro train station homeless guys hunker down along the walls for the night, dotted lines of misery in a sea of neon prosperity.  Connect the dots and they spell out a larger story of many more dots around the world in even worse situations; a larger story of how the twentieth century has made humanism an untenable belief system for all but the blinkered and bunkered.  But who am I to speak?  I sell microscopes that cost more than a car… 

Today I had a discussion with another partner and then headed to Hamamatsu with him for a local show.  It was very small but surprisingly interesting for me.  I finished Malouf’s collection, enjoying at least two stories enough to recommend the book which I think starts with the weaker half and then ends with some pieces of real insight.  One story talks about how telling a true story means giving one’s life to back it up: “The Bloody Sergeant comes on, announces that a battle has been won, bleeds a little, and after twenty rugged lines retires into oblivion.  But what he has been called upon to tell has to be lived with and carried through a lifetime, out there in the dark.”  That’s why telling about independently verifiable facts is easy, almost cowardly: it requires no personal commitment.  But telling someone about your faith – now that’s a story! 

I started into Graham Greene’s “Travels With My Aunt” after that and can already tell I’ll enjoy this one too.  Greene manages to be both entertaining and deep at once.  Pearls in slop, perhaps, but obviously there and there for the sifting. 

With a stop at a T-shirt store near the train station I took care of the last item on my shopping list.  And yes, I walked there blinkered.  I don’t know what else to do. 

 

2 thoughts on “You know you should stop when you can’t think of titles

  1. SursumCorda

    Interesting. I never thought the pronunciation of “antipodes” was odd — but now I know that’s because I never heard or even thought of it in the singular. It looks as if the singular is actually a more recent form than the plural, which may account for the difference.

    I don’t know the cost of your microscopes, but I’ll bet I could find a car more expensive if I tried. 🙂

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  2. thduggie Post author

    I know it isn’t that odd per se for the stressed syllable to shift as an additional syllable is added (or subtracted, if, as you point out, we take the chronological order from plural to singular) because the stressed syllable is a fixed number of syllables from the end (ante-penultimate in this case), but it’s still counter-intuitive for me and makes English pronounciation difficult. Particularly since there are counter-examples like innovate/innovative/innovatory.

    Yes, you could, and I can think of one red “matchbox” beauty in particular that would certainly qualify.

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