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Last week was Golden Week: a string of bank holidays eagerly awaited by every last Japanese salaryman. Four or five days usually spent busy sitting in massive traffic jams in order to reach one of Japan’s perennial vacationing spots, presumably amidst a few million other people intent on same.

Yes, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that you are better off staying at home during Golden Week and wait until pretty much any of the remaining 51 weeks in the year to take your vacation at half the price and half the crowds.

Unfortunately, things being what they are (and my days off being what they are), Golden Week vacation or no vacation, were my only options.

After securing two extra days to make it an actual week (Golden it may be, but that “week” ends on a Wednesday night), I took a rest from the deadly boring lovely Kansai countryside and headed back for my hometown: Tokyo.

Although I would have been just happy sharing my time between sitting on the grass in Yoyogi and drinking under the bar in Shinjuku, relationship diplomacy dictated that a compromise be found with the traditional holiday activities and a 2-day trip to nearby Choshi was on the program. Considering its proximity to Tokyo (about 2h by train from Tokyo station), Choshi peninsula is a pleasant enough destination for a weekend, provided you do not stay anywhere close to the main city (your usual ugly mix of generic concrete jungle and urban decay that make 99.9% of all Japanese cities in rural areas) and head out for the smaller villages along the coast. Although the sea still wasn’t warm enough for bathing, we kept busy with a couple walks around the coast (cue obligatory lighthouse, seaside temples etc.) as well as inland crossing through countless patches of cabbage (a local specialty, apparently). Among the locales accessed through the picturesque Choshi Dentetsu railway line, Choshi boasts of Inubō, a station whose name literrally means “Woof” (or, in a less vivid translation, “Dog’s Bark”).

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Tidbits of daily life in my very own secret underground volcano lair, otherwise known as Kyoto University’s Bioinformatics Center…

  • Our lab building is one of the more modern on campus (remind me one day to capture some of the cool derelict buildings that sit on the edge of the campus: I swear, on sunny days they look straight from some Dr Moreau’s Island movie). The architecture is somewhat reminiscent of California-style 60’s: think John Lautner’s Desert Modern with more wood or Lloyd Wright with more glass… At any rate, it’s considerably nicer (and in better shape) than my last place of work.
  • I spend my days at work barefoot (and I love it). Like most Japanese research labs, ours is a shoe-free zone: you are required to leave your outside-shoes in a locker by the door.
  • Another typical Japanese tradition: food omiyage. Mix this with the fact that, out of a dozen researchers, there will always be one or two freshly returning from a trip abroad and you have a kitchen corner that looks like an international food court, all year round.
  • We have, I kid you not, twelve different recycling bins in our lab. That’s not counting special items like batteries, pens, electronic parts etc., which all have their specific recycling deposit box in another building. Every friday afternoon, all the lab’s researchers have a giant round of Jan-ken-pon to pick who has to bring it all out to the campus’ recycling center.
  • My morning commute from Kyodai’s international residence to the lab is approximately 10 minutes by foot (on a leisurely stroll). I believe this is the closest I’ve ever lived from work to date. Also: since the residence is all the way to the top of a small hill, while Kyodai’s campus is at the very bottom, I could ride my bike the entire way and not have to hit the pedals once (and possibly end up smashed by the Kyoto-Nara express train while crossing the tracks, but beside that). The hike back is way less fun.
  • Beside the ever-impressive Entrance Ceremony and half a dozen redundant mandatory lectures on miscellaneous research-related topics, I am finally getting to the good part of huge layer-cake bureaucratic administrations: welcoming parties! Five of them, to be exact: one for each level of subdivision of each faculty or research institute I officially depend on. Free food (and booze): yay!

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I just spent half a day learning how to handle radio-isotopic material, feed my hypothetical SPF testing mice and properly dispose of dichloromethane (hint: not by flushing it down the drain), all in Japanese.

… Which would all be very useful if, you know, I ever worked with anything else than my computer and a blackboard.

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Yesterday was the day I chose to take care of all official administrative duties required by my new occupation and place of residence. Since I am not one to spread the pain, I went the all-inclusive package road and decided to do in one fell swoop: Foreigner Registration, National Health Insurance and Postal Savings Account (required, since the Monbukagakushō won’t give me my money on any other type of account)…

A delightful half-day excursion into the darkest recesses of Uji’s city hall and its – luckily adjacent – post office, made only more fun by the foreshadowing brought upon by close to five years living in Japan and nearly as many trips to a local city-hall…

First, was the usual cursing-under-my-breath of my parents’ screwed-up sense of humour whimsical inspiration, while trying to explain a frightened counter guy that, really, I could do with only two of my five given names and that anyway, the form would never fit them all. All in vain, of course, as the 500-pages form-validation manual for employees is very clear on that: [all] given names must be filled-in. Unfortunately said manual did not indicate how to deal with printer limitation on field size leading to half the names being left out of the printed version. But it only took another couple breaks of cold sweat and a dozen trips to various superiors to be settled by manual use of a ballpoint pen.

Then, I must be becoming really jaded (or I have done this too many times), but the only question on my mind while filling my slightly unusual (yet technically EU territory) place of birth was not: “will they take it as is” but: “how long before they come back to the counter with their world atlas in hand”.

I was wrong.

The employee who came back 10 minutes later, was carrying Wikipedia printouts. Times, my friend: they’re a-changing.

Incidentally, my current home address, not counting name and apartment number, is:
京都府宇治市五ヵ庄三番割官有地
京都大学国際交流会館おうばく分館.

Do you know how many kanji there are in there?

I do.

After filling out by hand eight different forms requiring my address, I. most. certainly. do.

And for the record: don’t even think of abbreviating 京都大学 to 京大 to save two kanji, because she’ll catch you and make you correct it like the naughty schoolboy that you are.

I just can’t wait to do it all again in six months when I move cities.

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Sensei: Blah blah blah… international collaboration project… blah blah blah… grant submission accepted… blah blah blah… Five year budget.

Dave: Great. But, huh, how does it affect me?

Sensei: How would you feel about going to Berlin or Boston for three months? All expenses paid, of course.

Dave: Sure, what’s the schedule and which project would I be working on?

Sensei: Oh, it’s entirely up to you, just pick the faculty and project you’d like to work on and a time during this fiscal year you’d like to go. Where would you prefer: Berlin or Boston?

Dave: Dunno. Both are nice. Does either include daily spa and massage, by any chance?

Sensei: If you want, you can do one country this year and the other next year.

Dave: You don’t say.

Sensei: We’ll also send you to their workshop in Boston this Summer anyway.

Dave: Recession hasn’t hit our lab yet, has it…

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When I first arrived to Tokyo, I noticed that, come the end of winter, weather forecast screens (in trains, on TV, wherever…) would start adding an extra line under the main sun/cloud/water-drop pictograms. Since the new icons usually depicted lovely little pink flowers or trees blowing in the wind, I naively assumed that this had something to do with upcoming sakura blossom (which wasn’t completely far off, considering most local newscast do have an official daily progress report around sakura season).

It is only a couple years later that I finally understood what this seasonal indicator actually referred to. The infinitely less enjoyable season of eye-puffing, nostril-irritating, headache-inducing, Japanese hay fever. The main reason behind these infamous surgical masks you see people wearing in every damn last “Nippon culture” TV reports.

However, it wasn’t until I moved to the Kansai countryside last month, that I started experiencing for myself what it might feel like. Apparently, my city-dwelling organism was sufficiently immune to Tokyo’s own brand of pollution-laden pollen to go through Kafunshō season unharmed, but much less happy about living in the middle of the woods. Woods no doubt entirely planted with deadly cypress and cedar.

If you happen to be walking in the hilly area surrounding Kyodai’s research campus in Ōbaku, these days, and spot a gaijin with puffy red eyes on the verge of tears, rest assured it does not [yet] have anything to do with feelings of sadness or elation at living more than 20 minutes away from the closest place selling proper balsamic vinegar or non-ersatz chocolate, it’s just the damn neighbouring conifers trying to copulate with my mucous membranes.

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When leaving the residence, this morning, I found a note in my mailbox.

Under a delightful MS-Word Clipart-esque depiction of what your mum’s 60’s medicine cabinet might have looked like, sat an ominous “Urgent Warning” about the evils of (illegal) drugs, in big bold red letters. Promising resident researchers somewhat decreased health and much decreased freedom of movement, should they choose to ignore said warning during their stay in Japan.

The thoughts going through my head were, in that order:

  1. “What’s so ‘urgent’ about that warning? drugs are bad? Quick, somebody gets the message to Syd Barrett and Janis Joplin before it’s too late.”
  2. “You mean there are drugs within a 300 mile radius from here?”
  3. “Wait, what is this note doing in my mailbox. OH MY GOD THEY ARE ONTO ME!!!”
  4. “No, seriously, where are the drugs? And how come nobody’s told me anything?”

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a.k.a. The Long Overdue Life-Update

The three people still reading this blog on a regular basis (two of which possibly paid by the Chinese government after some bizarre translation mix-up convinced them I was a dangerous political dissident to be monitored) might have noticed the lack of substantial news on this blog for quite a long time. OK: even less substantial content than usual.

I also realise that the lack of proper context as to my whereabouts made a lot of past blog entries somewhat puzzling. If this can make you feel any better, I am pretty sure that my own genitors have had only the faintest sense of my exact location, occupation or plans, ever since I was last sighted, putting a finishing touch to my grand World Domination Plot Master Thesis.

In fact, it took all that time for the plan set in motion nearly a year ago to finally reach its final stage (tonight).

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I just received notification of clearance for login access to the institute’s Super Computer Lab. I have the computing power of a few thousand CPUs laying at my fingertips, waiting for orders…

Can’t wait to see how fast Unreal Tournament runs on a cluster of CRAYs.

Now we’ll see who gets that top score on the SETI@Home project.

“This will greatly help me compute substrate cleavage point predictions for this new set of data in reasonable time, thanks.”