Tokyo Japan LDS Temple

 At the end of Brian's 3 weeks of work, Angela got to fly out to join him in Tokyo for nearly a week of touring.  Angela's parents and her sister Heather stayed with our kids for us in NM.  One of the first things Angela wanted to do when she arrived was to visit the LDS temple in Tokyo so that we could make sure that we did it before we may have run out of time touring other things.  Here's Angela out in front of the temple.

 There's hardly any temple grounds, rather it's a temple building that is quite close to the surrounding buildings.  There is a very nice city park of gardens across the street though.  Here's Brian standing in front of the small garden area next to the temple.  It was a bit of a rainy day.

We really enjoyed visiting the temple here.  They had headsets for us to listen to English.  It was so neat to experience something so spiritually important to our lives in a different language/culture and still have the same feelings there.  It really helps you to know that God is the Father of all of the people on earth.  We also enjoyed attending an English speaking ward that was at a building right next to the temple.

Sushi Train and Tokyo Visit

For dinner on 7/7, Yoshi took us to a so called sushi train restaurant, which means that you sit down in a normal setting but there is a conveyor belt that circles by every table with various sushi dishes you are welcome to grab.  You pay for each item you get with most plates costing $1 or $2 (100 or 200 yen).  There is also an ipad like tablet at each table that allows you to browse the menu and select any item you want.  When you order an item from the tablet (almost the only thing we ever did) then a Shinkansen like train drives to your table, on these train rails above the conveyor belt, and stops at your table.  You then take the dish and push a button to let the train know it can return.  It was fun to have all this variety and customization available to you.  I did try some sushi but also had French fries and a cooked fish.  All of it was good.  

 Here's a few of the dishes I had.  Raw shrimp sushi, tempura, California rolls, and mackerel fish.   The ice cream was a banana flavor and was in a cute dish.

 Here's me about to eat the mackerel fish.  Eating all this food with just chop sticks has been a bit of a challenge, but I'm used to it now (you do get a spoon for ice cream though).

 On 7/9 we did a long, 1-day trip to Tokyo for a workshop.  Sylvain and I were the special guest, invited speakers and then Yoshi and two others gave talks.  It was a workshop of Japanese researchers studying nonlinear acoustics and noncontact sources, so it was perfect for me with the current projects I’m working on.  The people didn’t speak that great of English so I hope they understood the presentation.  I didn’t get many questions from the Japanese people I didn’t know, and it made me wonder if they didn’t understand my presentation, were bored by it, or maybe I just gave a great presentation leaving nobody with questions (not likely).  One of Yoshi’s former students was there and he said I gave a wonderful presentation and that it inspired him very much and may have changed his career path.  I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant but it was nice compliment.  There was a small party afterwards and it was awkward since there was a lot of Japanese spoken and it was hard to communicate with those who tried to talk to me in English.  By the end of the day I had a fair amount of motion sickness from the many elevator rides and a total of 3 hours on the bullet train to and from Sendai.  We also found a geocache near the workshop building which was fun to introduce Yoshi and Sylvain to.  We did get to ride on the fastest Shinkansen in Japan, the Hayabusa train.  Here's two Shinkansen trains with both connected (they separate during transit at some point to two two different tracks).

 Before the seminar in Tokyo, we had some okanomi-yaki food which was quite good.  They cook it and bring it to your table and place it on a hot plate to keep it warm while you get pieces of it to eat.  Mine had potatoes and cheese and other stuff.

 Here's me during my talk.

 Here's a night view of Tokyo.

Here's a fun video from the sushi train restaurant.  They apparently have these types of restaurants in the U.S.  I might recommend trying one sometime.  It's a fun experience.

Eel and Japanese People Observations

The 6^th was a very rainy and very muggy day in the evening.  Even so when the work day was done it was not raining yet and I decided to walk to the hotel and stop at a store on the way.  The store was called Don Quixote in Japanese of course and I bought 5 umbrellas for 50 yen each (like 50 cents each).  By the time I reached the hotel it had rained a lot and I was sweaty from the humidity.  There are many store type places where the Japanese can gamble by playing a game called Pachinko.  It is VERY loud in these places and people sit there mindlessly playing.  I even saw people waiting in line for over an hour before the place even opened up in the morning.  

 We enjoyed a dinner at a teriyaki place where you have a menu with various things to have grilled for you and you buy them by on individual skewer sticks.  Here's Sylvain trying to decide what to order.

 Here was my choices.  They were quite good.  I had a pork wrapped asparagus one, a bacon wrapped sticky rice cake thing, and I can't remember what the spiral things were.

 The restaurant requested patrons to remove their shoes and you walk down these elevated paths past the tables.

 Here's people waiting in line for the bus we take every morning.  They wait patiently in neat lines.

 I met up with Sylvain to go to dinner and we decided to try the place that Yoshi describes as a fast food Japanese restaurant, Yoshinoya.  There I had a rice bowl with eel on top.  I was nervous at first but the eel tasted just like normal fish and wasn’t bad at all. 

I have made some observations about the Japanese people that I wanted to be sure to make a note of.  First of all, you rarely see kids around.  I know that the Japanese people don’t have large families and actually I think have less than 2 children per family (declining population) but it is still strange.  Maybe the culture is not to bring the kids with you when you go out I don’t know.  The kids are quite cute and are like you’d expect kids to behave.  It’s a shame I haven’t been able to see more of them.  Another thing I learned about the culture is that there is virtually no hugging in their culture and no saying of “I love you”.  This is true even among families, parents don’t hug their kids.  Sylvain told me that that’s essentially true in French culture as well, the no hugging thing.  That is so odd to me since hugging is so integral to my relationship with my wife and kids and my parents and siblings.  I have also noticed that people here very strictly form in lines.  There is no cutting and no crowding.  As people wait for the bus they form a line and strictly stay in that line.  People don’t crowd the curb when they wait to cross the street either, they’re happy to wait back away to make room for any cyclists passing the other direction.  Another thing is that the teenagers and college students, and even young adults are ALWAYS on their personal electronic devices.  A bus will drive past you and you’ll see everyone looking like they are hunched over sleeping, but most are texting, surfing the web, and listening to music (like Americans I guess).  Some are actually sleeping and it’s likely due to their very long work hours.  It is actually very common for people to work essentially all day long and every day in fact.  They do stop for meals and do non work related things while at work but they are always there.  They also work on Saturday and Sunday, not the whole day but at least part of the day.  Another interesting thing is that you’ll see many bikes parked in an area behind a bus stop and it seems that most of these bikes are actually not locked up.  Many people feel free to just leave their bikes in a public area and not worry about them being stolen. This is also true downtown when people go in to a restaurant.

Matsushima and Church in Japan

 It was sad to miss the 4^th of July in America.  This is one of my favorite holidays.  I have done a lot of shopping and enjoyed some more new foods.  On a Saturday we went to Matsushima which is a small town on the Pacific Ocean coastline and enjoyed some nice views of the very interesting looking small islands.  We then had some great pizza that night.  We visited a shrine and a temple that day as well.  I bought a kendama toy at Matsushima.  Here's a very colorful photo of the temple we visited.  Seems odd to take photos at the temples but I verified it was ok to do.

 Another photo of the main temple.

 Here's the low end of the range of toilets common in Japan.  This one is for going number 2 (if you know what I mean).  You have to be careful I guess.

 This view of the various islands in the Matsushima region (there are over 1000 islands) is one of the top three most scenic locations in Japan.  The waters are normally very blue (they weren't for us due to the recent heavy rains).

 Another view.

 Here's the shrine we visited in the area.

 There was a long bridge you could walk on to tour a small island.  Normally you pay $2 to cross but we happened to get to the bridge just after closing and it was open to cross freely.

 These islands are quite amazing looking.  It'd be nice to have a private home on one.  However, this is the region that was hit hard by the tsunami of 2011 that was quite destructive.  You couldn't see much damage in this particular area because it's in a bay and was protected a bit.

 After the Matsushima visit we went to a nice pizza restaurant ad had some unique pizza that is very similar to Italian pizza rather than a typical American pizza.  This was the most interesting one that looks like a bear's foot or something.  It was quite good.

Sunday morning church meetings were a highlight on my trip.  The services were from 10-1 and when I walked up to the building 15 minutes before the start of the meeting there were maybe 12 people standing in two lines on each side of the doors to welcome everyone.  This was impressive that everyone wanted to shake my hand and personally tell me good morning (sounds like ohio gozaimas).  I had an interpreter who was a Japanese returned missionary that was assigned to interpret sacrament meeting for me.  He was very nice.  It was so neat to feel the Spirit so strongly even though I could not understand anything that was being said.  To see people of faith that were from such a different culture share the same feelings about the gospel and about God and His Son was just amazing (this was a very similar experience to the one I had while attending church in France 3 times).  Then in gospel principles and in priesthood meeting I had two different missionaries from the U.S. interpret for me.  There was a newly baptized member that was confirmed also and it was just so nice to feel of the Spirit during his confirmation.  Everyone was interested in who I was and why I was there.  There were a couple Americans there.  The new mission president and his wife also attended the meetings and met me.  After the meetings were over it was like people didn’t want to leave.  They stayed and talked and wanted to talk to me some more.  I look forward to next Sunday’s meeting.  Two gospel insights that I heard that impressed me were 1. That sometimes we can fast just to request that our will be more aligned with God’s will and 2. That as home teachers it’s not so critical that we share a message in their home each month but that we make it a point to talk to them weekly and get to know them so that will we know if they need anything. 

 I spent much of the afternoon walking and talking photos and enjoying some cultural music events.  Here's one of the famous streets in Sendai that is lined with trees in the middle and there's even a walkway you can enjoy in the middle.

This is video from the Buddhist temple of the drums being pounded (I enjoyed that).

Here's video of the Tohoku University a capella group that I stumbled upon.  I enjoyed watching this Japanese man dance to the music.  It was quite good singing.

Starting Work in Japan and Food

We were to meet up with Yoshi at the university late in the morning since he had a lecture to give early that morning.  We then met up to ride the bus.  It was easy enough to locate the bus stop and we immediately found one of the buses we could ride was waiting there.  We had bought a bus pass that had a fixed sum of money on the card and we used it for the bus fare.  You insert the card when you get on to set a starting point for determining your bus fare.  You also enter the bus at the middle.  We selected the correct location to get off and had to insert the ticket again at the front of the bus and it automatically deducted the bus fare from our passes.  The day was just fine as we talked about experiments that had been done on the key samples that we were trying to evaluate and we made plans for experiments to do while we were there.  Here is my lunch from the cafeteria on the campus.  It was a breaded pork, rice bowl with seaweed on top (quite good actually).

We also bought tickets for a professional baseball game that we’ll attend on Friday 6/11.  It was overcast the entire day.  It’s not so hot here temperature wise but the humidity is very high so it often feels very muggy and it’s easy to start sweating.  I have also noticed that most Japanese people do not wear hats even when it is sunny and most also dress fairly nice, typically with button up white collared shirts and dress pants.  Rarely do you see people wearing jeans, which I almost always wear.  It’s also assumed that you WILL wear socks with sandals and it won’t be a faux pox!  You must wear slippers in people’s homes and in offices and lab spaces.  Each of these places will have some extra sandals for you to put on.  You are to stand in a certain place while you wear your outside shoes.  

There are even bathroom slippers, just for the bathroom, that are different than the rest.

After work Yoshi took us to a shrine site to see the nice view of Sendai.  Shrines correspond to the Shinto religion and temples correspond to the Buddhist religion, perhaps the two common religions in Japan (religion isn't so common for most people here though).  The shrine gates were closed but here's a photo from a distance.

After the shrine visit Yoshi took us to a volcano ramen place.  I took video while Yoshi was driving (I was sitting in the front left seat, normally the driver's seat in American cars, but Japanese drive on the left side of the road).

Here's the volcano ramen with video of when they bring it to your table and pour in the boiling water to cook your food right in front of you.  It was fun to watch and was quite tasty.  These kinds of meals cost around $10, so not so bad.  In general the meals here cost between $5 and $10 or maybe $15.