After an uneventful but looooong plane flight to Narita Airport in Tokyo, we eventually arrived at the place that would be home for two weeks. NEC Takaido House is an NEC-owned and subsidized "dorm", mostly used to house NEC employees from other countries. We realized quickly that NEC were the major sponsors of our contest..not only did they provide this nice single hotel/dorm room for each of us, they gave us a good deal of spending money to handle the two weeks we were there. Dave Barry says that the only way to see Japan is to have Random House pay for your trip; I think having NEC pay for it is just as good. :-) (yes, Dave Barry Does Japan was popular airplane reading among all of the MIT people who flew out on the same flight..)
Most of the daytime was spent working in the machine shop with our teammates, who we'd met over email in the week before the contest began. Each team had a member from each country---the US, Britain, Germany, Brazil, Korea, and Japan, so communication was interesting. Everyone spoke English, not all very well, and there were translators around to help, especially with Japanese, Portuguese, and Korean. I traveled with my team to TITECH each day on nice, crowded rush hour subways, which really are as crowded as they say. We worked from about 9am to 6pm, with an excursion to attempt to get food for lunch without speaking any Japanese each day. The machines all progressed pretty well, and most of the people involved in the contest pretty much agreed that we were here to have a good time, work to make a machine we were proud of, and not really care who won or lost. It was much more friendly than competitive.
We did get some time away from TITECH though--a whole 2.5 days off, and a half day tour of a Ricoh research and development lab. In our free time, my team did lots of things together. Especially on the first day off, when the TV crew offered to take our whole team to a museum and then out to lunch so they could film us. This was a pretty good incentive to hang out together... After we escaped the TV crew in the afternoon, we visited Asakusa, an area of Tokyo with two famous gates at either end of a very long street. Since we had to play the part of tourists, we stopped to pose for a picture. (Sougo's not in the picture, since he took it. awww.) The long street was filled, not suprisingly, with hundreds of identical tourist shops, all selling the same cutesy keychains and chopsticks. At the other end of the street, past the second gate, there was supposed to be a shrine, but we never did manage to find it.
On another day off, a bunch of people visited a town called Kamakura, which is famous for its many shrines. We saw the Great Buddha shrine, which is mostly at 42 foot statue of the Buddha that's about 600 years old. The shrine around the statue was destroyed a few hundred years ago by a storm, says the tourist brochure. It was cool to see, and warranted some more obligatory pictures, but I didn't scan them in.
But the trip didn't consist of too many days off, so we went back to working in the shop. And working in the shop. And occasionally discovering new things about Japanese culture, like the little buildings with red lanterns outside. A red lantern basically means "beer here." :-) They're small bars, with room for maybe 10 people maximum. I discovered that my dislike for beer was mostly grounded on the fact that American beer sucks; Japanese beer was much better, particularly with dinner.
Then the day of the contest came around, and our working in the shop paid off. (despite the time I spent logged in over a damn slow connection across the world when I should have been working in the shop, but our machine was already close to done...) We went into every round saying "ok, we can lose this one, it's okay, this was fun anyway", and we kept winning rounds anyway. At the end, we WON! If I wanted to be conceited, I could claim to be one of the 6 best engineers in the world. But that's probably not nice. Especially since the whole contest was not all that competitive, and when you have 8 well-built sets of machines in a contest, there's more luck in winning than simply engineering skill. But I still get to gloat. WE WON! WE WON! NEC gave each of the winners a prize, and apparently they didn't realize that a woman might be on the winning team. We got very nice watches, with the contest logo engraved on the back, which are rather obviously men's watches. Ah well. At least we weren't on the second place team, who got tie tacks. Ahem.
The day after the contest, I went with a number of people to Nikko, in the mountains about 3 hours north of Tokyo. Nikko is the city that the shoguns ruled from at some point in Japanese history. (It's interesting how little of the tourist drivel you manage to pick up when it's spoken in another language. :-) In addition to being very pretty and much less urban than Tokyo (you can't get much *more* urban than Tokyo--the city is HUGE!), there was also a large shrine dedicated to the shoguns. There were many buildings and temples, and one of the shoguns is buried there. Each building was an incredible example of traditional Japanese art and architecture. The detailed wood carvings covering everything were just beautiful.
While we were in Nikko, we also went to see a waterfall. It was really pretty, and I was pleased with the pictures I took of it. It's the biggest waterfall I've ever seen, but I've also never gone to see a "touristy" waterfall anywhere...
A recurring motif in decor around the places we visited were Oriental dragons. This one, on a fountain outside the shrine at Nikko, caught my eye. I think he's cute. One temple at Nikko had a ceiling with a huge mural of a dragon, also. The dragon was supposed to guard the temple itself. Because of interesting acoustics, an instrument could be tapped in the room with the dragon mural that would make a loud, echoing noise that was supposed to sound like the roar of a dragon.
On the way back, we all carried our machines from the 2.70 contest back through the airport. These nice weird looking things with motors, air cylinders, strange looking bits of metal and plastic, etc all went throught the security X-rays. Without so much as a second glance from the security people! (The same thing happened in the US, too...) I feel safer now.
Japan was a lot of fun. It's good to be back at MIT though, where everyone once again speaks the same language as I do. Too bad my body still seems to be staying awake on a schedule that matches normal business hours in Japan rather than in Eastern Daylight Time.
