I’ve finally gotten around to uploading some of those videos:

Crab Walker with clever leg placement mechanism:

Industrial robot arms fight a lightsaber duel:

Robot Waltz

Apparently, I was naieve in thinking so. For whatever reason, sex does seem to be one of the first things many people think of when I say that I’ve lived in Japan. One of my good friends had a lot of fun ribbing me before I went, saying that regardless of my intentions prior to arrival, I’d end up staying at least 10 years and coming back married. The comments from my coworkers in the military tend to be somewhat more lewd: “So, how many of them did you bang? I hear those Asian chicks are freaks!”

I don’t generally answer that question, even in the sense in which it was intended: as an invitation to tell some entertaining lies and bond. The truth is irrelevant, and I tend to get too nervous to properly tell a spontaneous story unless the listeners are all good enough friends that I don’t mind if it flops.

There are people who will tell you that the Tokyo nightlife is a continuous episode of wild debauchery. Perhaps they are correct; I don’t know. Given that work generally ran until around 8pm, the trains stopped at 2am, and it took almost two hours to get to or from any of the party districts in one direction, it never seemed worth my while to actually try it out. The few times I did end up in a Tokyo night, I was hanging out with Sarah.

The people who brag of their nocturnal conquests in the city somehow never speak of extending their reach into the surrounding towns and suburbs. There is a reason for this: even if there are wild nights in Tokyo, the nights in the outlying areas are quite tame. Businessmen make it home from their commutes no later than 10pm, and in Japan, that almost always means they actually were working in the office until 9. Those businessmen represent almost 100% of the evening traffic; even if office workers regularly stay late, retail businesses in the countryside (with the exception of combini) all close at 5.

There are, of course, exceptions. However, the countryside nightlife tended towards small izakaya or karaoke; places that you go to with a group of friends, not places you go to meet people. More to the point, I wasn’t really seeking a girlfriend; it was only a minor disappointment that fate didn’t see fit to provide one from the blue. Japan’s a wonderful place, but it’s not really a good one in which to seek true love–at least, not until you’re significantly more comfortable with the language and customs than I ever was.

I got lucky, though. In my Japanese class in college, there was a woman named Sarah. By lucky coincidence, she grew up maybe half an hour from my hometown, she attended the same Japanese class that I did, and most importantly, she was part of a student exchange program that put her in Tokyo the same year that I was in the next prefecture over. She was pretty. She was friendly. She was engaged. Actually seeing her took some effort, as we were about 100 minutes from each other by train, but the prospect of conversation unencumbered by inhibition made the journey worth my while.

Every few months, then, I would arrange to go do something with her. We went to an amusement park; we went to explore Yokohama; we celebrated an American-style Thanksgiving with her homestay parents; we did many things. Most of those events remain only as snapshot memories from which I derive the rest of the occasion, but one really stands out in my mind: the road trip.

It was early spring, and we both wanted to try something beyond typical tourist attractions, something that would get both of us to a part of Japan that neither had seen before. We decided to rent a car in Tokyo and drive north to a natural hot spring resort in the mountains of Nagano. The area gets few non-Japanese tourists, and it seemed a good way to get a bit more immersion than usual. Renting a car in Tokyo was easy to accomplish, and reserving a room in a ryokan, a Japanese-style small inn, was only slightly more difficult. Everything seemed like it was going to be easy.

Driving in Tokyo is crazy, but not really all that much more crazy than driving in Boston or New York. It turns out to be really easy to adapt to driving on the left side of the road; the only hard part to adapt to was the fact that the windshield wiper and blinker switches were on opposite sides from what I expect. The road signs were rare and usually incomprehensible, but it was for that reason that we had reserved a car with a built-in GPS unit. We hit a small snag when we realized that neither of us could understand the GPS interface well enough to actually program in our destination, but we did what anyone would: we pulled into a gas station, showed the address of our destination and the GPS unit, said “onegai” (please) and “wakarimasen” (we don’t understand) a lot, and gave our best puppy-dog eyes. The station attendant was friendly, as every service-industry employee in Japan is, and pushed a lot of buttons on the screen and then it was showing arrows and a colored line projecting from our current location. We thanked him, and drove.

I am skeptical of the notion that any two people together in a confined space will of necessity become friends. That trip, though, tested my skepticism. Sarah and I didn’t have a whole lot in common beyond a shared interest in Japan and Japanese, but we found that in that car, we could just talk. Somehow, hours of what would have been tedious cross-country driving alone became vibrant and enjoyable. We noted the scenery when it was remarkable–surprisingly often, it was–but other than that, time just seemed to vanish.

In retrospect, there were plenty of hints that the GPS wasn’t taking us where we expected to go. The gas-station man had said quite a bit, actually; we just couldn’t understand much of it. As we ascended the mountains of central Japan, there was quite a bit of snow, but we passed a point in the early afternoon when the snow started going away. There was the fact that, hours after we had expected to have arrived, we were still on the highway with quite a long strip of hilighted road showing on the GPS. Despite all that, both of us were surprised when we saw a rare English-translated road sign: “Welcome to Niigata City.” Shortly after that, we discovered a beach. We had driven clear across Japan en route to its center.

There really wasn’t a whole lot we could do about that except laugh. We played on the beach of the Sea of Japan; we ate dinner, and then we went off to find a more competent gas-station man. Accomplishing that, we set out and drove again.

By the time we arrived and checked into the ryokan, it was well after dark and there was no hope of catching any of the attractions we had planned originally to see that day. There was no time to waste on a weekend trip though, so we asked the owner if there was anything interesting still open. He shrugged, and pointed us to an izakaya, which is more or less a Traditional Japanese Pub.

Imagine a Pub in the romantic sense: it is the relaxation area of the common man, where the locals of a town will gather each night to unwind. It is a place of joviality and games, and the friendly atmosphere of the working folk of a small town who have all known each other forever. Now, make it Japanese: beer is beer the world around, but instead of darts, there is karaoke. Instead of wood paneling and hunting trophies on the wall, there are tatami mats on the floor and calligraphy on the walls. Best of all, instead of hostile locals suspicious of any outsider, the people there were delighted to talk to foreigners, to buy us drinks, to compete with us in karaoke. It was a fascinating night.

The next day, we visited a natural hot spring in the area, known for having been discovered and first used by monkeys. The thing about monkeys is that no matter how often they bathe in a hot spring, they still make the whole area smell like monkey residue. We visited and touristed around for a while, and then we headed back for the long drive back to Tokyo.

The overwhelming majority of the time that weekend was spent in the car. We spent more driving time to vacation time on that trip than on perhaps any other trip of my life. Despite all that, despite the unanticipated addition of hours of driving, I can’t say that that time was wasted. Quite the contrary: it is rare to spend so much time in one go in a state of perfect companionship. Those hours of driving are a treasure in my memory.

The most noticeable differences between Japan and the US are of scale: Japan, as a rule, tends towards smaller and denser construction. What’s impressive is the lengths to which the Japanese take this tendancy. My first day there, I saw a one-car driveway with a small hydraulic lift installed so that it could fit two; I saw a little purple excavator not much larger than a typical American SUV. Roads themselves tend to be about as wide as one and a half American lanes, and they lack sidewalks; the expectation is that most traffic is pedestrian and that cars will just scoot carefully past one another when they do meet.

The real fun wasn’t in any individual artifact or oddity, though, however amusing. It lay in the simple fact that whenever I wanted, I could set out on my bicycle and find something new and cool. I explored a giant temple one day on nothing more than a whim, and found acres of carefully landscaped Buddhism. I rode out another day and found a flooded golf course: perfect challenge terrain for a mountain biker. I went out on an extended trip once and saw the World’s Fair, featuring huge and elaborate displays of corporate prowess. Another extended trip got me to the International Robot Exhibition. Other days brought nothing more than the simple satisfaction of seeing the sun rise over a canal in the outskirts of Tokyo, and realizing that the national emblem of a red circle on white background is a perfect illustration of the sight.

There was the first weekend I arrived in my apartment, when I went out to explore my surrounding area. I got tremendously lost, and wandered for a good four hours–but the things that I found! I saw ordinary road bridges, decorated with gull sculptures spaced so that bypassing cars would see them rotoscoped into flight. I saw factories and ironworks adjacent to apartments; I saw machinery which looked both well-worn and far too preposterous to be real. I saw farmers’ houses with ripe onions sitting on the stone fence and beans hanging by strings from the eaves. I saw rice paddies stretching to the horizon in one direction, and busy suburbia in the other.

There was an unimportant summer night when I went out for a walk, expecting nothing more than fresh air. What I found, instead, were two separate fireworks displays; two towns celebrating for no reason more than that fireworks are fun. To simply walk toward unexpected festival explosions on a whim for over an hour, through rice fields and hamlets, was a uniquely Japanese experience.

There aren’t many places in the world where one can wander easily on foot and see all of this. I was privileged to have been able to live in such a place; the satisfaction of exploration was one of the reasons I loved living in that country so much.

In the past, particularly when they played movie themes, I’ve become nostalgic for my own time in a elementary-school band. However, today I cracked up laughing at the sheer goofiness of what they were playing: an overblown operatic rendition of “This Old Man (Came Rolling Home),” complete with tuba solo. I don’t know if that’s a nursery rhyme here as well, but I do know that it’s impossible for me to take that tune seriously.

In other news, last weekend marked the 365th (and 364th) day of my stay in Japan. On the year marker, I went to Tokyo for the day, much as I did on the first. This time, however, I was focusing more on social entertainment with friends I’ve met here, as opposed to the major touristy stuff, of which I accomplished as much as possible on my first day in the country so as to get it out of the way as soon as possible.

2 August: Tokyo -> Boston -> Rochester, NH
12 August: Boston -> Seattle
18 August: Seattle -> Newark
(NJ stuff goes here–details to be figured out later)
20? August: NJ -> vertumnus1′s family’s place
27? August: Drive back to NH

I actually have very little detail on the movements after the 18th, but those are being coordinated by people who aren’t me.

The last weekend of this month has come and gone, and I can say with certainty that this is not a trip I will forget soon.

It started with a rental car. One of the strongest guidelines when planning this trip was that it was to be cheap; neither my friend nor I wanted to spend more than was absolutely necessary, because near the end of the month both our budgets were stretching. There was a cheap ryokan with an onsen* (~$40 per person per night) a reasonable distance out, but it would cost $80 per person for a five hour train ride on the local trains, or $120 for a shorter ride on the shinkansen. Luckily, I discovered that it’s possible to rent a car for the weekend for only $80, so in theory we could actually pull off the entire trip for under $100 per person, which seemed reasonable.

Driving in Japan, in general, is not actually as big a transition as I had expected. It’s not very difficult to stay on the proper side of the road, and road signs are generally easy to understand, at least on such issues as the speed limit, one way roads, and general traffic control. The biggest issue is that the blinker lever and the windshield wiper lever are on opposite sides of the steering wheel; all too often, I would attempt to signal a turn and set the wipers in motion instead.

The car rental place with the good deal, however, was located in the middle of Tokyo. Driving in Tokyo is not pleasant. It’s got the congestion of New York, the street layout of Boston, and it occupies a larger area than either of those. Furthermore, the signage with respect to major roads is ambiguous and confusing, even though major words are listed in roman characters. After about 90 minutes of general confusion trying to find the proper highway out of the city, we pulled into a gas station and asked the attendant to program the car’s GPS route-planner for us**. Luckily enough, the attendant there was very helpful and friendly, and after about five minutes of fiddling with the controls he had the GPS displaying a dotted line of arrows along the intended route. He conveyed that he hadn’t put in our exact destination, but an approximation which should serve until we were closer to the destination and could get someone else to reprogram the GPS for us.

With the help of the GPS and its associated software, we soon made it out of the city and on our way. By 2pm, we arrived at the end point of the GPS’ programmed route, and sought out another person to reprogram the GPS. To our great dismay, we discovered that we were in Niigata–on the coast of the Japan sea, about twice as far as the ryokan. We had assumed that the gas station man had programmed an intermediate destination; he had instead sent us to the endpoint of the correct highway.

There wasn’t much to do at that point except curse the gas station man soundly, play in the ocean a bit, and turn around. After another four hours of scenic Japanese highway***, we finally made it to the ryokan, where we were delighted to be greeted in person by the proprietor, who spoke quite good English. After we were checked in and settled, we headed to a nearby izakaya**** for dinner, and maybe drinks. As it turned out, gaijin were a rarity in that place, and the locals were happy to buy us sake while we sang american songs at the karaoke machine and chatted with them in whatever combination of English and Japanese we could muster between the lot of us.

The next day, we headed out to the nearby wildlife park to see the snow monkeys cavorting in the natural hot springs. While there was a large colony of monkeys in the park, they seemed reluctant to enter the water until the park attendant threw some food in, at which point there was a mob.

The monkey park was at the end of a path of decent length up the side of a mountain. Across a small valley, there was an onsen for people based on the same hot springs. I must say it was much more enjoyable than the artificial onsen at the ski place, in large part because there was almost nobody else there. The indoor bath was comfortable, but what really made this onsen memorable was the outdoor bath. Apparently, though the practice becomes rarer as time passes and as population densities increase, it was common at one point for onsen to be mixed-gender installations. This practice has not entirely died out. Though the indoor baths were segregated at the baths near the monkey park, both indoor baths had doors leading to the same outdoor bath. That would have been easy for me to deal with, particularly as the mixing of genders was entirely theoretical while I was there; there were no women in attendance. What made the experience hair-raising was the fact that the outdoor bath was situated such that one had a magnificent view of the mountain across the valley, and the path up it–and all the people on the path had an equally unobstructed view of the bathers.

I did try the outdoor bath, reasoning that this was not a chance that would present itself to many people, and I would rather preserve my adventurousness than my modesty. That said, I watched carefully and made sure that there was nobody on the path before venturing between the indoor bath and the outdoor. There was one guy, however, who had no such qualms. He was standing outside the outdoor bath, stretching, relaxing, and enjoying the view. When I first ventured out, he said in decent English that the water there was too hot for him; apparently, he was not going to let this spoil his enjoyment of the outdoor scenery. At one point, he waved to someone on the path, standing tall so as not to be missed.

I didn’t stay in the outdoor bath for very long.

After walking back from the onsen, it was time for us to head back to Tokyo. We would have had a pretty smooth time of it, as it was simplistic to tell the GPS “lead us home.” However, traffic on the way into the city was inexplicably dense for a Sunday evening, and we lost an hour and a half in the jams.

Last weekend was an adventure of the sort that I’ve grown up reading about and wishing to have. Yes, we were lost most of the time, spent four times as much as we meant to*****, and had an itinerary meager enough that just reading about it is undoubtedly making the more planning-oriented members of my family cringe. At the same time, it was time spent in enjoyable company, doing interesting things (at least while we weren’t driving). It felt full, and satisfying. In particular, the whole thing felt like a more authentic experience than I expect most people have. I’ve stayed in high-class hotels in both the western and the japanese style, and I’ve done most of the touristy things to do in Japan. I’m not going to complain about comfort, luxury, or style, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a sanitized vision of Japan presented to tourists. Going on this trip, I feel like I’ve peeked behind the curtain, and seen the sort of thing that I would as a native. Being able to say that is immensely satisfying.

It was about a year ago, now, that my parents approached me with a remarkable proposition: if I could find a job in Japan, they would pay for my airfare. I had already decided that it would be pretty cool to live and work in Japan for a while, but I had no sort of definite timeline; the idea was that it would happen after I got sick of my first job. Their proposal suddenly turned my previously nebulous ambition into a concrete plan, and it was way too awesome to turn down. I ended up with a job that I feel like I lucked into, not just because of the transportation windfall, but because it is almost a parody of what I might have described as a perfect job, in college: I never have to wake up before noon, I work about 20 hours per week, and I have no trouble at all making ends meet.

Despite all that, the job is not perfect. My main complaint is that I live in the middle of nowhere; I am in a town too small to have a train station, and in Japan that’s saying something. Put otherwise, this town has approximately the same population as the one I grew up in (30,000 people), so I naively expected the same sort of commercial infrastructure: a library, a mall, a variety of restaurants, a movie theatre or two, and a main street with a number of miscellaneous shops. Instead, there are exactly 14 stores in this town: 2 grocery stores, 3 hair salons, 2 clothing stores, 4 restaurants (one is devoted to ramen, and another to udon), and a few miscellaneous shops. To get to a library I have a half hour bike ride ahead of me. To get to a movie theatre, I have the same length ride, plus another half hour on a train.

In other words, when I have exhausted the Internet and computer games bore me, I can be stuck with literally nothing to do unless I’m willing to spend at least an hour on my bicycle. Worse, businesses around here tend to close around 2200. If I want to find some entertainment after work (I usually get out of work sometime around 2100), there is almost nothing I can do without going all the way to Tokyo. This just isn’t worth it, mainly because the trains stop running around midnight.

The time will come in a month or two that I have to decide whether or not to renew my contract and teach here for another year. There is definitely a temptation to do just that, and essentially coast. I recently received my first performance feedback (after only 7 months!); the comments from the parents’ day some months ago. Somewhat to my surprise, it was almost universally positive. On the other hand, teaching is not my chosen career; it is something I am doing because of extraneous benefits. More to the point, I am somewhat dubious already about the value of my degree as a job enabler in a field in which every “entry-level” job listing seems to want 3-5 years of development experience; with each passing month not gaining experience, my ability to find jobs in the field diminishes further.

My options, then, seem to be as follows:

1. Just renew the contract and worry about the future later. The pro is that there is essentially no effort involved. I even get a raise that, over the course of the year, will add up to an additional two weeks’ salary. On the down side, I have to live here for another year.
2. Not renew the contract here, but transfer within the company instead. The benefits are that I get to keep the raise, and I get to live somewhere else. On the other hand, I’m fairly certain that I lucked into quite literally the best job this company has to offer; if I went anywhere else within the company, at best, I’d have to work a lot more. Furthermore, with only a few exceptions, I kind of like the students that I have; in particular, the adult students comprise just about my only social contacts, and I am deeply grateful for their friendliness. I would feel bad leaving them to go teach another group who will likely be less fun.
3. There exist IT jobs for people with minimal Japanese who happen to be living in Japan; what immediately caught my attention was the fact that out of four such jobs that I found in half an hours’ browsing, the minimum salary offered was 2.3 times my current, and the average was 3.5. I understand that the cost of living in Tokyo will offset those gains, but I do want to live in a big city at some point, and Tokyo is about as big as they get. The main trouble is that I’m worried about actually procuring such a job. When I was looking for this job, I examined a few hundred job listings and sent applications to about 40 before this one accepted me. The number of IT jobs around here for which I am qualified are dramatically fewer, and I don’t want to be stuck jobless in Japan if I do turn down the contract.
4. I could end the Japan thing and look for programming jobs in the US; I have no doubt that I could turn up something. On the other hand, it feels too soon; I have a few ideas about when it would be right to leave Japan (my student loans are fully paid off, or I become fluent in Japanese, for example) and none of them seem likely to happen before this contract expires.
5. I could try for grad school. I’d be limited there to English-speaking countries (my Japanese just isn’t up to par for actually learning things), but that’s not actually a huge limiting factor. It’s more appealing than leaving Japan and heading directly into another job, but less so than just staying in Japan.

Of these options, I like #3 the best. In the end, I’m sure I will have to decide for myself, and if I can bully myself into being the person I want to be, I will go for the third option. However, these decisions are not made in a vacuum; I’ve laid out my options because I want to hear what you people think about my options, and whatever recommendations you have.

I have pictures, and I have stories to tell. Unfortunately, right now I’m running near the edge of exhaustion; all of these things will have to wait until later. I’m going to try to stay up late enough to greet the new year at its moment of arrival, but there’s no guarantee that I’ll succeed.

My holidays have been extremely nice. I can only hope that life has been treating the rest of you as well this holiday season.

Last week, my students told me that there would be a big fireworks celebration that Saturday near here, and a bigger one in Tokyo that Sunday. By accident, I slept through Saturday’s; I could hear the end of it outside my house, but I didn’t have time to ride to where I could see it. Last Sunday, I went to Tokyo to see the bigger one, and discovered posters telling me that it had been on Saturday.

Tonight, I went outside just before the sun set; I was thirsty, and I figured that I could get something from the vending machine, then watch the sun set across the pond in the park near my house. I did this, but as I was returning to my house, I saw in a different direction a big airburst near the horizon. A few seconds later, there was another.

I walked for about half an hour towards the fireworks, until I got to a good spot, with no high obstacles nearby to block my view. From that point, I saw fireworks being launched from no less than four launch sites at varying distances. Three of these were long, obviously official celebrations; one was sporadic, and looked like someone had just bought some fireworks for their own private celebration.

I have no idea what this is about. None of my students told me that there would be fireworks tonight, yet obviously this was something planned. I wonder what’s going on?