Doing business in Japan

I'm going to lump days 2 & 3 of our Japanese trip into a single quick post, because it's getting late and I need to get to sleep.

On Wednesday, Rachel and I went to Nagoya to get ready for the seminar I was helping to present on Thursday. I ended up spending a lot of the time developing subtitles for the two videos we wanted to show -- the last of the subtitles were typed out on Thursday morning, while the first sessions of the seminar were running. The final system we worked out was for me to take a machine transcription and fix it to be proper English; then, Luna would convert it to Japanese, and I would fix any linewrap and timing problems in the Japanese. Doing it that way, we managed to get about 4 minutes of subtitles done in a little less than an hour.

Lunch in Nagoya was "Hokkaido" cuisine, I think. In my case, that meant slices of seasoned pork on rice, and in Rachel's case that meant fried chicken. Probably the most interesting dish was the "Hokkaido Oyakodon." Oya means parent, and ko means child, while don is short for donburi, which refers to a rice bowl. Normally, oyakodon is chicken with egg, but Hokkaido oyakodon is salmon and salmon roe. Luna thought the name was funny and clever, so she ordered it. By the way, Luna has been a huge help this trip; I did my best to give her a pile of gifts, but it's really hard to say thank you enough.

After we were done with business stuff in Nagoya, we went sightseeing with Ikeda-san. He took us to see Nagoya tower, and then we went for kaiten-zushi (that's conveyor-belt sushi, the first time we've had it!). It was good; I've discovered that tuna sushi can indeed be delicious, you just need to get the high quality stuff.

The next day's seminar went fine; I did some of it in Japanese, but the modeling I did in English with Luna interpreting. I wanted to do it in Japanese, but I just didn't have time to memorize enough terms. It was a pretty big stretch just getting the videos ready. There was one glitch ("Matches perfectly, you can join it! Oh, apparently you can't, sorry"), but we worked out what was going wrong before the end, and use it to illustrate a common mistake ("This is what compatible mode is for! So if you also see this problem, switch to compatible mode!").

After the seminar, we wandered around Osaka with Luna, visiting the massive shopping district of Dotonbori. I have a video of Dotonbori, but no photos, sorry! Various random things were bought, and we ate dinner at Luna's teenage hangout, a kind of all-you-can-eat pizza place. Available pizzas included ham/pineapple, squid ink/squid/onion/tuna flakes, chicken/corn, and shrimp/corn. Yes, the Japanese really do put corn on pizza. It tastes fine, really--the squid ink on pizza probably deserves more attention, although it mostly makes it black and tastes vaguely of ocean (of course I tried it, don't be silly). We're planning on meeting Luna again in a couple of days for a trip to Nara, her parents' current hometown.