A Penguin in the Orchard

Getting Settled

Things have finally begun to settle a bit in Japan. The first task of the trip was completed yesterday afternoon to everyone’s satisfaction. While I have a few free minutes on this cool and cloudy Sunday, I thought I’d bring you up to speed on some of the details of this working trip.

It’s almost impossible to describe the size of the telescope in any meaningful way. I can tell you that the primary mirror is 1-meter across - roughly 40″. I can tell you that it weighs more than 4 tons. I can tell you that the dome in which it operates is more than 20 feet across, or that when extended, the telescope measures 22-feet from the floor. None of that really provides a sense of just how large this instrument really is. The photo at left only does it marginal justice. But let me try. The battleship gray object in the picture is the camera. It alone measures more than three feet across. It’s filled with 10 5 megapixel CCD chips that run so hot as to require liquid nitrogen for cooling. You can see it venting a bit in the picture popup. This is a huge optical instrument, meant to track Near Earth Objects for the future health and safety of the Japanese people.

Our first night was spent in Okiyama after a two-hour ride in the train pictured in the most recent entry. We flew through urban Japan at breathtaking speeds, passing through some train terminals at well over 70 mph. In the open spaces, our speed exceeded 120 mph. Urban Japan ffrom a train window has always reminded me of William Gibson’s Chiba City from Neuromancer; huge bright neon signs and crowded streets. A compete absence of total darkness and a sense that much is going on far beneath the surface of what’s seen. There’s an urgency to the crowds in the streets and a tangible feel for the future. Gibson painted it in very dark hues, all of which seem perfectly apt when experiencing the pulse of Japan’s great cities from behind the glass of a bullet train.

Even the rural areas of Japan bear little resemblance to the rural areas of the States. Our Mitsubishi host, Mr. Matsumoto, commented yesterday that the Okiyama prefecture was so spread out and wide open. It’s all a matter of perspective. In Iowa, you can drive for miles without so much as seeing a farmhouse, the landscape outside the car window filled with corn fields and pastures full of cattle. The image to the left is an example of the Japanese definition of rural community - Takahasi at 8:15 this morning. I’ve always known rural communities to be as broad and spacious as the countryside that surrounds them. That’s clearly not the case in Japan. Physically, rural communities in Japan seem much like their urban counterparts - they just have fewer people. The sense of crowding into a very limited land space is exactly the same.

Then there are the truly rural areas. They’re much as I always expected them to be prior to my first visit to Japan - terraced rice paddies ringed by pagoda-style homes. The images of Japan as a country seen by grade school children across the US are, as it turns out, pretty accurate. It’s not uncommon to see farmers in the rice paddies, knee-deep in water. With such limited space on the island, these paddies are sculpted into the landscape with great care, taking at once a prominence in the panaorama yet an economical slice of the true physical land. It’s a land where the most must be made with the least, particularly in agriculture. These areas are, in fact, a bit more open than the rural communities. But the mountains that make up the island of Japan frame them in small plots, dotted with family homes and family cemetaries laced through with breathtaking narrow mountainside roads.

The work is going well, as is the visit. I’m enjoying Japan much more this visit than the last as I become accustomed to the culture, to the landscape and to the minimal Japanese phrases necessary for everyday life. It’s become a goal to return with no business other than to share the beauty of Japan with my family.