Showing posts with label Kawasaki. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kawasaki. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Chance meetings at dinner


After a work meeting where the Fujitsu team told us about things they are doing and we told them what we are doing (my presentation went well), we all had dinner together. Fujitsu has a nice building with a fancy restaurant on the 20th floor, where you could see both Tokyo Tower and the Tokyo Sky Tree (very small in the photo above, though).


For some reason, the conversation turned to "people wearing strange t-shirts" at dinner. I was wearing a shirt with a Facebook 「いいね」 button (the "Like" button, in Japanese Facebook), which may have been a part of why this topic came up.


My boss told everyone that I also sometimes wear a shirt that says 「日本人ではありません」 ("I am not Japanese", in Japanese). One of the senior Fujitsu researchers then asked me: "Where you at Heathrow airport on October 1st?" Which a strangely specific question to ask, but since I was going back to Sapporo from the work meeting in Oxford on that day, I was indeed at Heathrow airport on October 1st. He then said that he was too; he was going to a conference in Spain and changed flights at Heathrow. He remembered seeing some weird guy wearing a shirt that said "I am not Japanese" in Japanese. So it appears we had met before.


Fujitsu research show room


We got a short tour of the newly built Fujitsu research show room. They showed us lots of cool things that were all working demos. In the photo there is a talking teddy bear to the right of the cute woman showing you things. If you tickled the bear it complained, if you ignored it for long times it sighed, and it kept following you with its eyes.

There were eye tracking systems that zoomed and panned Google maps to locations you were just looking at, there were systems of cheap cameras connected to hand print scanners that could track and identify lots of people in the room, and many more interesting systems.

Christmas and Halloween at the same time


Christmas decorations and Halloween decorations are displayed together here. Which in this case means the Christmas displays are early.

Kawasaki trip


I got up ridiculously early in the morning the day after my birthday and took a plane to Tokyo and then a train to Kawasaki. We were invited to the Fujitsu research facility in Kawasaki to discuss research that overlap.


In Sapporo it was snowing lightly and not very warm. In Kawasaki it would have been OK to walk around in shorts, and I had to take off my jacket.

3D painting on the floor

I got lots of Yokohama omiyage (edible souvenirs). Yokohama is close to Kawasaki.