I have met many of my friends visited institutions in Japan.
One of my friends I met this time is top sales man, selling a swish product in Japan. He is in charge of all Asian markets. And, he earned top sales last 2 years in row. Since I am a scientist and might use the product he sells. I hope I would work with him in the future. We met a study group of reading “Against the Gods by Peter L. Bernstein” written about the finance matter. He used to work on Ph.D in biology, and we are also both interested in science, finance, marketing, and Jazz music. One night, we went to the cotton club in Tokyo. The show was great, and I could talk to the guitarist. The guitarist said to me that he decided to become musician when he was 12 and said it was late. I started playing a guitar when I was 17 years old. My intuition was good enough not to choose to be a musician.
I also met friends who married together. Both are bankers. We have known each other also most for 5 years something (I don’t remember exactly). We talked a lot. He believes most of Japanese banker has no idea for managing Japanese economy. We could share the idea. They got a baby lately. They said that the education is very important for our next generation. I brought one of my favorite books for them about Philosophy and Physics for them. We happened to find we both read the same book, that book referred the book I presented on that day. We are very excited. He had not bought the book because it was expensive and difficult to find in book store. I believe my present was good!!
(Unfortunately, this book was written in German, and translated in Japanese, there is no English version.)
I also visited the restaurant my friend is running at Tokyo, Roppongi. If you have chance to come to Tokyo, I will definitely recommend you to go to this restaurant. The concept of this restaurant is very unique. They think ingredient of food is very important. So, they collaborate with local farmers in Tokyo to provide the food. Also, the building was made old fashioned techniques but not old fashioned style. It is cool in summer, warm in winter.
(Roppongi Nouen (means Farm in Roppongi) http://roppongi-nouen.jp/, it is very easy to reserve your seat for dinner or lunch.)
I also visited KEK (KEK is high energy accelerator research organization) to meet a professor. When I was student, I was lucky enough to attend one of project in KEK with him. He was building one of spectrometers on J-PARC (Japan proton accelerator research complex). By making the spectrometer, I learned a lot about science and technology. And then, I published my first my first author paper from this project. That was pretty technical not like scientific though, I published more scientific paper for the next paper and I graduate. I left for the U.S. for 2 years something, the project has been proceeding in Japan of course and now they have a lot of scientific results. I am pretty excited about it. I am going to use that spectrometer as well, while I will be working at research reactor in Australia. The picture below shows that the computer which is used for the first web page from Japan. Sometimes, I realize how it is important and how I am happy to work on basic science because I might be working on wonderful technologies that people have not imagined.
(The picture was taken at KEK.)
This is not the end of my story with friends. I will write later.