First day of work. Woke up at 5:30 again. Went back to sleep but kept waking up, so I finally got up around 7:30. Usually, I have to be at work by 9:30, but my Takamura-san wanted me to go in a little early. He said he'd be in around 9. With nothing better to do, I left probably around 8. He gave me a "Passmo" card on Saturday that can be used for most public transportation. It's RFID, so you just hold your wallet up to the reader when you get on and off. You can also reload it when it runs out. Well, I got there super early and didn't know what to do, so I sat down in a covered area to play my DS. About two minutes later, a security guard came over to tell me I couldn't sit there. I explained the situation as best as I could, and he told me I could wait inside. After Takamura-san arrived, I got a guess pass, and we went to have my picture taken for my permanent one. For probably the next half hour, he introduced me to different people. Most of them were shocked when I introduced myself in Japanese, especially the ones who said, "Nice to meet you," and received 『はじめまして』 (Hajimemashite) in response. Finally, he had me stand in front of the office, got everyone's attention (who all stood up to see me), and introduced me to the office (probably 70-80 people). He asked me to say something, but he'd already said most of what I would have said, so I just said a few words, and everyone clapped. It was a little weird.
At lunch, he showed me how to buy and reload the dining card. The cafeteria is pretty nice, not to mention cheap. Most meals are around ￥500 or less. I had a bowl of udon. There's one quirk, though. Around 12:20 when the first person finishes and leaves, if it's not too loud, you can hear this girl whose entire job during lunch seems to be standing there and saying, 『ありがとうございました。お願いいたしま す。』 (Arigatou gozaimashita. Onegai itashimasu. Roughly translated as "Thank you. Please come again," although it's really polite). The thing is, as long as there's someone in the checkout area, she will keep saying it, and once the first person has finished, the line to leave is constant for the rest of the hour. The amazing part is that she builds up a rhythm to it and never deviates. Even her pitch stays the same. After about 10 minutes, it'll drive you crazy. In any case, to pay for lunch, all you have to do is put your tray down on the counter. The dishes all have RFID tags so a reader can scan your items, figure out what you had, and tell you how much you owe. It's pretty neat.
Work itself wasn't too exciting. Takamura-san gave me a rough overview of his work with a presentation he gave at Stanford a few months ago. After that, I spent most of the day setting up my desktop. He had already done a clean install of Windows 7 before I got here (in English, thankfully), so It was just a matter of installing programs that I needed. The first thing I did, though, was download a program that can remap keys on your keyboard (changing keys is just a matter of changing the registry, so I just found a program that will do it for you). The space bar on Japanese keyboards is about an inch and a half. If you rest your hands naturally, your right thumb sits over one of the transform keys (usually, you type in hiragana and use the transform keys to change it to kanji). The little bit that I need to type in Japanese, I can do without them, though, so I decided it would be more important to not be missing the space bar for every other word and mapped that key be space bar (translation: I now have two keys that will create a space). I also had to download a few programs more than once because I had some trouble getting to the English version. If a site is available in multiple languages (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.), it will default to the location of your IP. Google was the easiest. There was a big link in the bottom that said, "Go to Google English." Other sites weren't always so easy, but I managed to figure everything out. It's a nice computer, too. Really nice. It has 4 quad-core Xeon W5580 processors (about $1700 each), 2 GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards (each has 2 cores, about $500 each), and 12 GB of DDR3 memory (in the neighborhood of $300-$500), although, they probably bought the system as a whole, so I couldn't say how much they spent on it.
At lunch, he showed me how to buy and reload the dining card. The cafeteria is pretty nice, not to mention cheap. Most meals are around ￥500 or less. I had a bowl of udon. There's one quirk, though. Around 12:20 when the first person finishes and leaves, if it's not too loud, you can hear this girl whose entire job during lunch seems to be standing there and saying, 『ありがとうございました。お願いいたしま す。』 (Arigatou gozaimashita. Onegai itashimasu. Roughly translated as "Thank you. Please come again," although it's really polite). The thing is, as long as there's someone in the checkout area, she will keep saying it, and once the first person has finished, the line to leave is constant for the rest of the hour. The amazing part is that she builds up a rhythm to it and never deviates. Even her pitch stays the same. After about 10 minutes, it'll drive you crazy. In any case, to pay for lunch, all you have to do is put your tray down on the counter. The dishes all have RFID tags so a reader can scan your items, figure out what you had, and tell you how much you owe. It's pretty neat.
Work itself wasn't too exciting. Takamura-san gave me a rough overview of his work with a presentation he gave at Stanford a few months ago. After that, I spent most of the day setting up my desktop. He had already done a clean install of Windows 7 before I got here (in English, thankfully), so It was just a matter of installing programs that I needed. The first thing I did, though, was download a program that can remap keys on your keyboard (changing keys is just a matter of changing the registry, so I just found a program that will do it for you). The space bar on Japanese keyboards is about an inch and a half. If you rest your hands naturally, your right thumb sits over one of the transform keys (usually, you type in hiragana and use the transform keys to change it to kanji). The little bit that I need to type in Japanese, I can do without them, though, so I decided it would be more important to not be missing the space bar for every other word and mapped that key be space bar (translation: I now have two keys that will create a space). I also had to download a few programs more than once because I had some trouble getting to the English version. If a site is available in multiple languages (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.), it will default to the location of your IP. Google was the easiest. There was a big link in the bottom that said, "Go to Google English." Other sites weren't always so easy, but I managed to figure everything out. It's a nice computer, too. Really nice. It has 4 quad-core Xeon W5580 processors (about $1700 each), 2 GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards (each has 2 cores, about $500 each), and 12 GB of DDR3 memory (in the neighborhood of $300-$500), although, they probably bought the system as a whole, so I couldn't say how much they spent on it.
If you're ever staying in another country for a while and are trying to learn the language, there are two important things you should do. The first is to make some friends who don't speak any English. When the people around you know English, even if you try to speak Japanese with them, you always have a crutch to fall back on. Talking with people who don't know any English takes away that crutch. The second important thing is to make friends with people who DO speak English. I met four interns from Canada, and I hadn't realized how much I had missed being able to easily communicate. Two of them are half Japanese, and one is Chinese (though I think he's American by birth?). In any case, I think I've got most of my bases covered.
I've put a few pictures up at http://www.hazmatt.org/pictures/japan. There will be more later, and I'll eventually start showing some here.
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