Today combined work and a certain measure of pleasure as we took our microscopes to Nippon Steel Corporation where I used to work.  Again, I had another partner, and another long drive, so I found out that this man had studied marketing and accounting, but had worked at a supermarket cutting and packing meat before joining our distributor.  I’m going to have to make this my standard question with all the cool answers I’m getting. 

We took the Tokyo Bay Aqualine to Kisarazu, cutting off about one hour of driving time, and stopping at the Umihotaru parking area.  (Only by reading the Wikipedia article did I just now figure out that this is the longest tunnel for cars in the world.  I took it for just another Japanese tunnel.  The German Wikipedia article adds a comment on how the Tokyo Bay Aqualine is symptomatic of the Japanese policy of economic stimulation via huge government projects and old-boy cartels cashing in.)  The satellite view is pretty weird, but the view from the Umihotaru restaurants such as the food court commands most of the bay on clear days and even on a dreary, overcast one as today provides plenty of distraction with all the ships passing by.  I didn’t so much watch them as watch my overstuffed Sasebo Burger, named after the Kyushu town of Sasebo and a descendant of US marines stationed there. 

We arrived a bit ahead of time, which gave me a few minutes to surprise Ms Tsuri and Ms Sato, whom I hadn’t told about my visit.  I hadn’t told anyone but Suzuki-san, because I didn’t know how much time I was to have to visit friends.  At two o’clock we set up the microscope in a meeting room on a wobbly table and hooked the laptop to a projector.  I’ll spare you a blow-by-blow description of the demonstration, but it went better than I expected (I was working with a prototype today) and it measured all the samples we threw at it as easily and quickly as hoped for.  It was well past five when we finished; six o’clock when we got all our gear in the car and were ready for departure.  Toward the end, when we’d already packed up most of the gear, a few other guys from the electron microscope group I used to work with stopped by to say hello.  These are the guys (and Suzuki-san belongs to them) who tease me because of my bald spot and because my Japanese has deteriorated, but they’re also the guys who insist I stop by on pleasure instead of work sometime and that I make sure it’s a Wednesday, when their section leader has everyone over to his flat for drinks.  When Suzuki-san told them I was engaged they suggested Japan as a honeymoon destination and wanted to see a picture.  I obliged, and had the picture up on the canvas before they dimmed the lights again.  “It’s the Mona Lisa!” said Sasaki-san.  Judge for yourself…

Back home I had some excellent sushi in the restaurant in the ground floor of my hotel.  Not to make anyone envious, but it was eel and scallop and several tuna varieties and salmon roe and other tender bits, along with tamagoyaki and miso soup.  Aah…

 

I almost used “Stick Creap will give you a splendid time!” as my blog title, but I think I wouldn’t have been able to link to a photo of the powder creamer. 

In short: another longish drive, this time north into Ibaraki, home of natto (straight! senbei! hello kitty senbei! dried! rounded!), to give another demonstration, this time a near impossible feat of finding a tiny sample (smaller than the video resolution) on a large substrate and measuring a step height that, if found, would barely be visible through the inherent noise of the large scan instrument.  Of course we failed, but the customer understood; the measurements we made were actually very good (except for electrical noise, which this university seems to suffer from, I had that same problem at another customer at the same university; and except for not finding the step he wanted to see) and we gained enough confidence that he should send us a sample that we can measure in more controlled conditions back in Switzerland.  I used the image gallery on our homepage for the first time, and once I know which samples are where it’ll be invaluable. 

On the way there we stopped for “shogayaki,” thin pork strips fried in a ginger sauce, which apparently belongs to the routine of driving north.  I enjoyed it; my partner thought it a bit greasy.  As you can imagine, we again talked about all manner of things, how he and his brother never got along, how Janet and I met at church and that to him sounded romantic – a godsend – which I didn’t deny, but I did add that hanging out and drinking coffee is an integral part of church and what makes it a community (and more likely for a girl to meet a guy). 

When we were all done with our tasks at the university, he turned the ignition with a lusty “Let’s Go desu!” which I find neat because roughly translated that means “It’s Let’s Go!”  And go we did, a return drive mercifully without rain, and with me getting drowsy again.  Is it the car, or is late afternoon drowsiness simply the most persistent feature of jetlag when flying east?  I have no trouble getting up, but plenty of trouble staying awake around 16:00…

After some prepping for tomorrow I walked home from the office and got a good Japanese dinner of amaebi (ah-mah-ay-bee, sweet shrimp) sashimi, scallops with one half of the shell removed and baked in a mushroom-and-mayonaise covering (yes, it’s greasy, but good), baked tuna vertebra (or some such part), and potato baked in cheese, my backup in case my Japanese had led me to order something undesirable.  I decided to have my first ever gin and tonic in this Japanese restaurant, to good effect.  Stuffed, I repaired to my room, talked with Janet for about an hour, took care of work e-mails, and cranked out this blog.  Time for bed. 

 

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. 

 

We were scheduled to visit a customer today to explain the possibilities of a Nanosurf AFM.  Fortunately, we left early.  We got on the Odakyu line in Shinjuku (unfortunately not on the Romance Car, whatever that was) and thought we were on the express headed to Hon-Atsugi (who names places Genuine Thick Tree?).  I recognized some of the scenery from a previous trip to Komae, but we soon passed that.  We also passed the point where we should have changed cars because we we headed for Enoshima instead, and it wasn’t until three stops later that I noticed.  The advantage of that was getting to see a truck with the blog title posted on it and a far away sign that said “Feel Wood.”  It reminded me of nothing but the Häring company (and wasn’t posted in Genuine Thick Tree).  We caught a train in the other direction that left a few minutes after we got off and after changing where we ought to have changed we were soon in Hon-Atsugi, with still enough time to spare to have a quick lunch. 

But it had to be quick, so we grabbed a bite at the incredibly cheap Sakura Sansui, where we got full meals with all-you-can-eat rice and raw eggs – obviously not a place catering to foreigners.  I’ve gotten used to it, so I had my cholesterol for the week there: one egg on the rice and one in the miso soup.  Along with that I had saba (mackerel, not the island). 

A short taxi drive later we were at the customer site.  One of the guys we spoke with had a pencil that looked like a regular wooden pencil with a hexagonal cross-section, but was fitted with a tip that gave it away as a push pencil.  I give him as many style points as one can give a uniformed Japanese engineer. 

The taxi driver’s first name on the way back was Luna, fueling suspicions among us that there might have been something odd about him.  Guys in Japan aren’t called Luna.  We took a brief break in a coffee shop, where I had a large hot cocoa and astonished my colleagues by emptying ten little cream containers into it.  I wouldn’t have to do that if they went easy on the chocolate and used more milk.  Across the table sat a young woman in a pink coat with a pink purse obviously trying to read a research paper of some sort and not managing because apparently watching ducks molting would have been more exciting. 

The pit stop may have been our downfall, because the train we caught ended up being delayed because of an accident.  It appears my week was framed in accidents, Tuesday seeing one on the Saikyo line that delayed the Narita Express and today one on the Odakyu line that ended up blocking traffic between Sagami-Ono and Shinjuku.  Usually, “accident” is a euphemism for a suicide jump; Monday and Friday see the highest number of jumpers, those who can’t bear another week or those sucked dry by a bad one.  We got off at Ebina and took the Sotetsu line to Yokohama, then the Shonan-Shinjuku line to Shinjuku.  This ticket would have cost about twice the ticket we had, but we got a free pass from the Odakyu line.  They’ll somehow figure out how much they gave out in free passes and invoice it to the family of the jumper.  It sounds nauseatingly cynical, but implementing this rule led to a decline in suicides by jumping in front of a train in Japan. 

During the extra time we had, I don’t remember how we got onto that topic, but someone mentioned that NOVA had gone bankrupt.  This will, I suppose, lead to a lot of English teachers looking for work or hiring on with less centralized setups like Smith’s or just going private, as intimated in the blog I already quoted above. 

On the way back from the office, I took a slightly different route and happened past a store that sold men’s underwear.  I thought I might perhaps find a pair of boxer shorts with a quirky design as a stocking stuffer, but instead of that the store boasted a wall of DVDs with titles like Bareback Mountain.  Then I remembered I’d been warned about this part of town.  Sure enough, the next store offered a similar combination of merchandise.  I continued on and was glad when I reached the Yasukuni road.  There I stopped in a men’s clothing store and found out that I can find a suit in Japan, if I’m willing to accept that I’m the second largest size in height and largest size in waist. 

Through a maze of love hotels I made my way to the hotel, stopping on the way at Lee’s gyoza restaurant for a small dinner.  I had mushroom gyoza (potstickers), but this joint has all sorts, so maybe I’ll stop by again tomorrow. 

 

We checked out today, Ola to catch a flight back and I to check in to the Toyoko Inn that I originally had intended to stay in.  By nine o’clock we arrived at our partners’ office, where we stopped in for a quick coffee and tea before I took Ola to the Tokyo station.  As it turned out, he could have managed on his own, but it doesn’t hurt to provide a safety net.  We were already later than the worst rush hour, so the subway was not too crowded, and again emptied at Akasaka-Mitsuke.  At the Tokyo JR station I was a bit peeved that just in order to get on the platform I had to buy a ticket and couldn’t get a refund, which is something they manage to do at the Metro station.  A corollary of that I suppose to be that if your loved one (your darling, your joe) boards a bullet train (shinkansen), you get to wave goodbye at the wicket gate.  Romantic, eh? 

After I got back, we soon headed out to visit a customer who had recently bought our instrument.  He had some suggestions and questions but was satisfied with the results he was getting.  I improvised a scan protector with the top of a steel vessel for a specialty coating system, which might get him better results, but (a) he can’t measure with it and coat at the same time and (b) the Scan Protector we make is five times lighter and easier to handle. 

On the ride there I’d dozed on the back seat, but on the ride back I sat in the passenger seat and stayed awake and alert the whole time and discussed music promotion in Japan with Mitch.  He used to do that before he joined our partners. 

We’d had lunch at the Gusto family restaurant and I’d eaten too much despite having ordered a small meal, so I decided to eat less tonight and got myself some combini food.  Ground pork on a stick, beef on a stick, bread with mochi and mushroom paste in it, a vitamin C drink, and buckwheat tea made a balanced meal except that the fourth food group, ice cream, was missing.  Back at the hotel I discovered that this brand sold their little ice cream without the spoons that more expensive brands secret away in the lid.  I was about to cut up the lid to fashion a spoon when I remembered I’d just tossed away the contents of the Swiss International Air Lines Children’s Menu shoulder bag: plasticware and a napkin.  So it was thanks to the children’s menu that I could eat my ice cream in a civilized manner. 

I’m a bit tired and not feeling too great, so I’ll quit here.