A Penguin in the Orchard

Recoup and Recover

I’ve spent three days trying to get my body’s rhythms back in order. In particular, the sleep pattern has gone completely to hell. Thursday and Friday, I could count on only four productive hours at a time before a nap of several hours beckoned. Then, even that pattern collapsed. I got up from a two-hour nap at 6:30 last night and haven’t been able to sleep since. I think I’ll just quit trying to force the adjustment. I’m sure my clock will come back to CDT in its own time. Who knows? Maybe the motorcycle ride and the lawn mowing I have planned for the afternoon will clear my head and push me to the fatigue necessary to sleep well tonight. In the meantime, I’ve got a few more pictures and thoughts on the trip to Japan.

The Bisei Spaceguard Center has been a massive project for the Japanese for the past four years. The telescopes were designed and purchased at the beginning of the project, with construction of the facilities in Japan taking place over the following two years. Originally funded primarily by the Japanese government, the economic crisis in Japan has drained away most of the government’s ability to support the project financially. Instead, the physical operating expenses are now paid by NASDA, the Japanese NASA. Salaries and other operating expenses are paid by a one-time budget grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. In an extraordinary move toward a goodwill corporate partnership, Mitsubishi Corporation has assumed the costs of upgrades and repairs to the telescopes. In fact, Mitsubishi was our customer for this trip, with the Japan Space Forum serving as the financial and administrative intermediary between Mitsubishi and the Bisei Spaceguard Center. It’s a complex deal that made for difficult communication throughout the trip.

At left is the dome that houses our one-meter ’scope - the blue behemoth you’ve seen in other pictures. This is just part of the facility. There’s also an observatory with a roll-off roof for our half-meter telescope and a full control center with computer room, conference room, kitchen, laundry, and living quarters. It always seems important to put these images into an appropriate scale, as the project is, in many ways, much bigger than pictures can accurately convey. Look closely at the lower left corner of the picture. The battleship gray door at the bottom of the dome structure should give you an idea of the size of the dome. It’s a full-sized eight-foot door. The dome is, in fact, nearly five stories above the ground. I walked the winding staircase to the dome itself more than a dozen times each of the 12 days on site. Let’s call it an even 150 trips up, 150 trips down. If I gained nothing else from the trip, I think I added a little bulk to my legs.

The parties directly involved in the project had a unique and sometimes, to our American way of thinking, difficult approach to completing the tasks. Our company has only six full-time employees. We don’t spend much time in meetings, preferring instead to solve problems and address issues on the fly. I can come up with a plan and have individual discussions with the other employees within a matter of a few minutes. We’re very flexible in that regard and can, in fact, be very responsive to changing situations. The situation in Japan couldn’t have been more different. Each day started with a meeting that outlined the tasks ahead. Every item was open for discussion and revision, often by staff who were either peripheral to the process or unqualified to make the suggestions. They got equal consideration, nonetheless, even if it meant defending a method we’d worked out in advance to solve a problem. In all honesty, I easily spent as much time debating, discussing and justifying solutions as I did with tools in my hands. I won’t go so far as to generalize the method as Japanese. I will say it made for some frustrating days and, ultimately, a loss of valuable time in completing some of the critical tasks. While we accomplished nearly everything we set out to do, we were crushed for time in the last few days - time we’d have rather spent in implementing the solutions upon which everyone had agreed prior to our departure.

Because of the time constraints, we didn’t experience much of Japan outside the Bisei and Takahashi areas. We’d been promised a trip to Tokyo by our Mitsubishi host prior to the trip, but time simply ran out. In some ways, we had the reverse Japanese experience of most Americans who visit the country. Not many get to venture into the truly rural areas. They’re few and far between. And, though I was disappointed by missing out on one of the world’s great cities, I think I probably had a much richer experience - much more at the heart of the Japanese culture - than most visiting Americans. The picture at left will probably always represent Japan for me. Beautiful lush mountains enshrouded in rainy season clouds. Narrow roads carefully carved into the forests of bamboo. Small villages and homesteads sprinkled along the mountain sides, surrounded by terraced rice paddies flush with newly-sewn plants in perfect rows. The economical use of limited space is nearly indescribable in its efficiency. If I take nothing else away from nearly a month in Japan (over two trips), it will be an admiration and respect for the necessary partnership with nature of the rural areas.

My limited contact with the urban areas of Japan came primarily in transit between Osaka/Kansai International Airport and shin Kurashiki (Kurashiki station). You’ve already seen a picture of the shinkansen - the Japanese bullet train. It served as our transportation to the airport on Wedesday, as well. It was the first time I’d ridden in the daylight, when I could clearly judge the speed. Daylight also offered the opportunity to experience the shinkansen from the outside. While awaiting the first of three trains to Kansai in Kurashiki, two of these incredible transports passed through the station at nearly full speed. In some strange way, I felt them coming before I heard them. As they tore through the station, the roar rose to a near-deafening level. But the real impact was on my chest, the small shockwave preceeding the train kicking out air pressure that Saturday night cruisers with thumper boxes in the trunk could only dream of. The experience approached revelatory though it lasted but a few seconds. When I first reported aboard my ship in the Navy, I spent two weeks working on the flight deck, weeks that included hour after hour of flight operations. The roar of an F4 afterburner on the bow catapult had, as it turns out, nothing on the absolute power of the Japanese shinkansen at full throttle from fifteen feet away.

So, much of my view of urban Japan was as you see here - from the platform or the seat of the bullet trains. This particular image seemed to find itself - the clean platform and multi-paned windows framing the Western neon commerce of Okiyama. It was a very different world from Bisei, though only a hundred miles or so to the north. Minutes before this picture was taken, the platform was crowded with businessmen and working mothers, with children and tourists, obscuring the view of the city beyond. When the shinkansen departed, it left no one behind, just a perfectly framed hint of life in urban Japan.

In the end, the trip was neither all travel nor all work. The end of the day at the observatory meant wonderful Japanese food at low tables and repeated cries to the waitress of “simasen, simasen” (”excuse me, excuse me”). I did my best to extend those times, savoring every bite and hounding our host for further lessons in conversational Japanese. On several occasions, I took short walks through Takahashi, attempting to extend the day just a bit longer. This trip, as with all business trips, was neither all business nor all pleasure. The two were separated by hours in my hotel room, disconnected from the Internet and nearly any resemblance of familiar life as my internal clock struggled to maintain CDT half a world away. Much of the trip was spent in the pose to the left, the Zaurus cranking mp3s, the ashtray filling, and the TV broadcasting Japanese baseball as I wrote the daily summaries and updated the expense report that so clearly define a business trip. In the end, it was as I’d expected. The joy of discovery and adventure fell just short of making up for the time away from home and family.

As we left Japan on Wendesday, I looked around a bit more closely than on the previous trip. I soaked up the sights and sounds in a concerted effort to resolve the previous twelve days into a single series of full sensory images. Unlike my trip of December, 2001, I don’t expect to return to Japan on business again. It’s been a friendly home for nearly a month of my life - not a long time in the big picture, but enough to open the eyes of this kid from Iowa to a part of the world I can easily respect and admire. Though it’s moving in our direction, Japan is still clearly not the West. It lacks much of the bad and has left me forever charmed with the good.