Japan Trip 2023 Part IV: back to Tokyo and the ICIAM conference

It was then back to Tokyo on the fast train. We had a few days of shopping. I bought a yukata and found the gin that the Kyoto bartender had recommended at the Global Gin Gallery (it makes me happy just to say that name). The owner there also recommended the same one, and also The Herbalist Yaso Gin, which I also bought. I will try and resurrect my Gin Friends group (that lost momentum during COVID) and get them together for a tasting party. 

The hotel we were staying at (the Richmond, in the Mejiro district) provided breakfast, with food delivered by a robot. My friend with children says this is old news, but it was our first time and kind of interesting. 

Then my wife went back home and I stayed on for the meeting.The conference was ICIAM (International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics), the major conference in the field, held every four years. I call it the "Olympics of Applied Math" (but no-one else does). I attended a number of machine learning sessions as I want to learn more of the field. The most interesting one was by Rachel Ward, who was exploring the behaviour of stochastic gradient descent with variable steps sizes and "momentum". These are the ingredients in some of the most successful training algorithms for deep learning systems, but are not well understood. I also enjoyed the prize lectures of Weinan E and Leslie Greengard. I spoke in a session on Lithium Ion battery modelling, which had a number of interesting talks. Overall, it was worth going, but I probably will not attend another big meeting. They are more useful when you are trying to make contacts early in your career, not so useful at my stage. 

Some last notes about Japan:

• my feet are too big for the stairs there, had to be pretty careful
• there are few public garbage cans, so you end up carrying your garbage around with you most of the day
• August is not the best time to visit, it is very hot and humid. I had mild heat stroke a couple of times
• the train system is amazing: fast, frequent, comfortable (but not cheap, the tourist rail pass really pays off). 
• Seven Eleven there has also sorts of interesting things. I liked these triangular rice things covered in seaweed

Japan Trip 2023 Part III: Kyoto and Hiroshima

We travelled onwards by train to Kyoto and another Airbnb apartment. In the middle of the visit we had a day of Typhoon (apparently just another word for Hurricane), which was impressive. We hunkered down in the apartment and watched the storm. It lessened enough briefly for me to forage for food at the local Seven Eleven. There was a bar on the second floor of our building where we had dinner and I got a gin recommendation (more on that next post). 

Kyoto is the city of shrines (Shinto) and temples (Buddhism). I may mix these up in the descriptions below, apologies if I do. In the central area where we stayed, there were significant shrine/temples all over. Here is an example, but I am embarrassed to say I forget the details (shrine? temple?) 

One shrine complex further away on a hill featured hundreds of vermillion (described as a shade of red but I would call it orange) gates. This was to a Shinto god of rice (and sake) and prosperity, who had magical fox emissaries. 

You can pay to add a gate as a corporation, family, or individual. If you were on more of an average budget, you could buy a mini-gate to place on a side shrine:

When they were passing out religious affinity, I missed out, so I could not appreciate the spiritual connection from these sites, but the aesthetic aspects were impressive. On other side trips we saw a local bamboo forest:

and another temple that had been the retirement estate of a local lord:

One interesting thing in Japan, new to North Americans, is the multi-use buildings. These are multi-story buildings where different shops and restaurants are on every floor. I saw this first on a visit to Hong Kong, where I had lunch at a waffle restaurant on the sixth floor. Such a place would never get customers back home. It makes it hard to find places with google maps: you get to the location on the map but still have to figure out what exact building the place you are looking for is in, and what floor (and it could be in the basement, or in an underground mall at that location). This is not specific to Kyoto but this is where I got pictures of a good example:

Then it was on to Hiroshima. We only spent a few hours in the city, visiting the atomic bomb dome (ruins of a building near the epicenter of the blast), peace park, and museum. It is a reminder of the horror of war. The human race should have moved past this long ago but recent events have shown it is still with us. 

We moved to a suburb of Hiroshima near Miyajima, an island with a shrine and a nature reserve. The shrine had an associated gate in the water:

The nature walk had some excellent scenery:

There were local wild deer. This was a mixed experience. It was popular to feed the deer, and the population had grown to an unmanageable level. The government now discourages feeding to let the deer return to a level where they can exist in the wild. The transition period involves a lot of starving deer, painful to witness.

The hotel we were staying in had gender segregated mineral baths. We dressed up in the yukata provided by the hotel and tried them out. I know of this tradition from anime bath house episodes, where the characters bond and the men try to peek in at the women. I missed out on both these things but it was still enjoyable. 

Then it was back to Tokyo for the last leg of the trip. 

 

Japan Trip 2023 Part II: Kanazawa and Takayama

We moved on from Tokyo a few days ago and the next stop was Kanazawa. We are travelling by train, with a Japan Rail Pass that you can only get outside the country before you arrive. Western Europe has a similar rail pass program to encourage tourism. Both are good deals, we will save over $1K on rail travel with it. The other travel tip is to get an e-Sim for your phone before you come. You can keep your regular sim card for phone and text but get access to cellular internet. We set up ours with Airalo and this company also has options for the US and for Europe. 

Kanazawa has an impressive gate at the main train station:

and an impressive samurai era castle with nearby gardens:

The picture above is of a garden in a restored house that belonged to a prominent Samurai family. There is an area of town with traditional homes from this era. 

We next moved on to Takayama. This was my best experience so far in Japan, but maybe only because it was not so hot there. We had an apartment by the river, near a morning market where we got some local produce for a couple of meals (I am Veronica's personal travel chef). 

There was a fireworks display by the river one night. It was a traditional event, where men held the fireworks in their arms while they were going off. A local we talked to said they were covered with water before they do this, but does that really help if something goes wrong? I don't think I would do it. There are Spring and Fall festivals here with elaborate floats, some of which we saw in a museum:

There was an historical village nearby we got to by bus with traditional buildings from mountain villages and displays of the tools they used at the time. The shingle and thatch roofs were pretty interesting.

In another, longer bus side trip, we went up a mountain on a gondola at the Shinhotaka Ropeway. 18 degrees at the top of the mountain... heavenly. 

There was a very accessible grocery store, Family Store Satoh, near the apartment that I recommend. There is a seating area on the second floor where we rested after arriving before we could check in to the apartment. Veronica discovered that there is yoghurt in Japan made with Bulgarian bacteria, which made her happy. She is working on her chopstick skills...

We are now in Kyoto, just getting ready to head out and see a shrine. 

Japan Trip 2023 Part I: Tokyo

 We are a few days into a three week vacation in Japan. I will stay on an extra week to go to the ICIAM conference in Tokyo. It is the major Applied Mathematics conference, held every four years (so I refer to it as the "Olympics" of Applied Math). The conference was our excuse to take a holiday here as my grant can cover my airfare. The timing put us in pretty warm weather, 35+ and humid, but we are surviving with long breaks in air conditioning. 

We were four days in Tokyo at the start of the visit, staying in the Shinjuku area of town. Our hotel room was very small. I would say it is the smallest hotel room I have ever stayed in, but I have experience in a smaller one in Hong Kong. The interesting feature of the room was the fancy toilet with a control panel:

I can't speak for Veronica, but I did not feel confident enough to test out any of these features. My hesitancy might be due to the fact that I am now officially old! I turned 60 on this leg of the trip. The birthday celebration was a fancy lunch in the Tokyo SkyTree (Japan's answer to the CN tower, although it probably goes the other way). Nice view!

We had another nice view experience a few days before in the Tokyo municipal building in our Shinjuku neighborhood. This is a free trip although a hundred meters lower. 

Our neighborhood had a number of other attractions. It is famous for numerous small, old school bars in alleyways. We went to one of them and had a beer or two and small plates of bar food.

The Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden was near our hotel. These are extensive gardens with both traditional Japanese and European style formal gardens. 

We did three cultural things. We visited the Suginami Animation Museum (that was more for me than Veronica). Hey, I know these characters and the anime they come from! We had a nice lunch at a local sushi bar. Veronica looked up how to say "no wasabi, please". 

We visited the Sensoji Temple and lost our good humor after being too long in the heat without food. I bought an amulet against misfortune (or doom or maybe evil, I forget now -- anyway I am safe now from one of those three). 

We also had an interactive art experience at the teamLab site. This was really interesting with a bunch of the exhibits featuring knee deep water you waded through. Pictures do not do justice to the exhibits but there are teamLab exhibits in other cities, and I would recommend going to one if you happen to be anywhere nearby. On the way to the exhibit, we took the wrong bus, but then had a nice walk over a bridge and another view opportunity I will throw in at the end.