Strolling in Spring-time Kyoto.

Experiment, data analysis, sleep, experiment, data analysis sleep. Yeah the long silence is definitely due to the lack of much other than work of late. Not that I’m not enjoying it but it doesn’t make for very interesting writing. Other than that I have mostly spent my weekends on snowboarding trips or just generally hanging, but that's not so interesting. However with our final experiments of the financial year are over and I have my weekends back. Nicely enough this coincides with Japan’s most hospitable time of year. Spring.

So with nice weather and a bit of free time on the side it can only mean one thing. It’s adventure time. Or at least get the hell off of the mountain time. Fortunately Spring is also the time of year when many students are graduating and the Japanese Rail company run a special discounted ticket known as the Seishun Ju-hachi kippu (青春十八切符). This baby costs 11500 yen and grants unlimited use of non-express JR trains for 1 day. The cost gives you tickets for 5 days, or 5 people depending on how you want to split it.

So how to use this wonderful magic ticket? Thankfully there was an interesting event to get to, albeit all the way out in Kyoto. Armed with my discount pass and a few friends we headed out to a light up event in the Higashiyama district called “Hanatorou” （花灯路) . Basically, as per the Kanji, the streets were lined with little paper lanterns. Being a light up event we would need to wait until nighttime but with the weather being so nice it would have been a waste to not make a full day of it.

As I mentioned earlier spring is the best time of year in Japan, shortly followed by Autumn. I’d advise any one wanting to visit to come around those times. In winter it’s pretty damn cold and in summer…well let’s not mention summer. So after a good 2 hours on trains and a quick look around a nearby electronics store we set off to go for lunch in an area of Kyoto I’ve never been before. I can’t remember exactly where it was, just that it was north of Gion.

At any rate it was a gorgeous place for stroll. The streets where lined with many little boutiques and cafes and all other kinds of delights. I wasn’t so interested in shops and in fact our target was lunch. The said restaurant apparently had ‘Vegetables outside’. That’s it. Wonderful directions ey. Somehow or other we found the place, or somewhere like the place, and in my friends defence it was delicious. A lovely set menu of traditional Kyoto foods with lovely fresh vegetables.

After a meal like that there is something that is vitally important. Cake. We headed over to supposedly very famous cake shop close to the river. Famous didn’t cover it. Whilst the shop front wasn’t particularly big it was most definitely rammed. The quoted wait time to eat inside was over 2 hours. Not going to happen. The cakes however looked incredible. Shelves were lined with amazing tarts of all shapes and descriptions with some incredible fillings, sadly of course none of which were edible by me, damned milk allergy. Instead I just amused myself with the wonderful inconsistency of the namings and translations of the names from Japanese (for some reason they were translated to French or English but not both, and there seemed to be no realisation that Tart and Tarte mean the same thing).

Cakes purchased we moved on to do one of my favourite things in Kyoto, lazing about by the river. Now I know Ratty said “There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”, but I disagree. Simply spending time by the riverside is good enough for me. The river runs the length of Kyoto and slightly to the east and is very aptly named. 鴨川 means duck river and there are definitely a lot of those and all variety of water fowl. The weather was fine so I could just kick back and do a bit of bird-watching, spring time means there is plenty of courting behaviour on display and watching Japanese Kites swooping and twirling through the sky is really relaxing.

 

Gradually the sun began to set and we progressed over to Gion to the start point of the lantern road, Yasaka shrine. We progressed through the grounds after seeing a short display from some Maiko, Geisha’s in training, and on into Maruyama park just behind. Within the park were of course many small paper lanterns lining the streets but there were also many other light up displays besides. On of my favourites was an installation from students of the various Kyoto art Universities. The artworks were created with the theme of ‘traditional light’ and were very pretty.

The total light up course was about 5km so we spent a decent amount of time walking down from Maruyama park to the end point at Kiyomizudera. It was a very nice evening and something I doubt I’ll see again, maybe. Either way Kyoto is such a cool place to walk around that bathing in the light ambience of lantern light only enhanced the experience, the nice weather helped a lot also. We finished off with dinner at a restaurant serving traditional and contemporary tofu dishes including ‘yuba’ which is the skin that forms of the top of boiling soy milk. It was an experience to say the least though I’m sadly not so great at pulling Tofu.

Well that's it from me. With the rents up from now I’m sure I’ll get a bit of travelling done and have something more entertaining to write about.

Ja mata ne.

Defining terms

I’ve had this blog running around in my head for quite a while now so I figured it was about time I got it written. Now anyone who follows my Facebook statuses (you know who you are) will probably have noticed certain terms featuring time and time again and maybe, just maybe, you might be a little curious as to what I’m gibbering on about. If that’s the case then this post is for you.

1. Synchrotron/Spring8

In short this is where I work and essentially where I live. A synchrotron is a kind of particle accelerator, the name coming from the synchronous tuning of a guiding and accelerating magnetic field that ensure particles in the accelerator ensure both a circular path around the synchrotron and also keeps there speed constant at just below the speed of light.

Now note I said accelerator, not collider. I do not smash atoms together. I do not create black holes. I am not looking for hitherto undiscovered particles (godly or otherwise). Right now that that’s off my chest I’ll tell you what I am doing which involves exploiting a handy little oddity of electrons.

As these electrons whizz around the ring at breakneck speeds they are constantly being deflected, to maintain that all-important circular path. At the deflection points they will slow down a bit losing energy. But that energy has to go somewhere and so it is radiated in the form of photons of light, x-rays to be precise. Originally this was an accidental side effect but these days’ synchrotrons are built with this phenomenon in mind and with that we come nicely to term number 2.

2. Beamline

These are the positions around the synchrotron at which the x-rays are actually emitted. X-rays act just like any other rays of light so they can be diffracted reflected and focussed in the same ways. The beamline contains the apertures; lens and mirrors used for this purpose as well as big end-station hutches that house the equipment needed for the particular experiment you want to perform. They are essentially a synchrotron scientist’s lab.

 

3. Beamtime

As you can imagine synchrotrons are not infinitely large, such a shame I know. As such the number of simultaneous experiments is limited. Unfortunately the number of scientists wanting to perform experiments is much greater than the number of beamlines. The usage period is therefore allocated in time slots that users refer to as “Beamtime”. This time is always fairly limited and precious so we try ti make as much use of it as possible, hence all the sleepless nights . In fact nothing causes more sleepless nights than the next term.

4. Beam dump

The original term comes from the piece of equipment used to absorb the energy of particles in a particle accelerator to safely stop them. For me and anyone working in a synchrotron however the term is synonymous with “Oh no not again”. Without circulating no x-rays will be emitted and therefore no experiments can be performed. They can happen for a number of reasons. Sometimes it can be down to hutch interlock problems meaning there is a chance a worker could be irradiated by escaping X-rays and so they need to be shut off as quickly as possible. Other times it is down to the electron source (wonderfully known as an electron gun) or the accelerator itself, which leads to instabilities. What it always is though is damned inconvenient. Sometimes a dump is a matter of moments, other times it can last for hours and when the beam comes back all it’s parameters may have changed, meaning the experimental set up has to be re-optimised and more time is lost.

5. Beamline staff

Golden rule, make these guys your friends. They are the people who run the beamline with expertise generally in construction engineering. They develop and maintain most of the equipment and software for performing experiments and will help your experiment run as smoothly as possible. Treat them nicely and you’ll have a nicer time during experiments, especially if there are problems – there are always problems.

 

6.Speckle patterns

These are the stuff that dreams are made of, provided you dream about coherent diffractive imaging (CDI). The experiments I perform involve illuminating samples with very bright X-rays and measuring their reflections from atoms within the sample using a detector similar to those found in digital cameras (though quite a fair bit more expensive). Speckles occur when photons of light with the same wave length, the distance between the humps of the lights wave form, interact with different regions in the sample and are reflected to the same degree. The photons interact additively or destructively and so we see spots of very intense signal or patches of no signal on the detector.

Each speckle contains contributions of reflection from the whole sample so it is the variation in intensity and the periodicity of the samples that hold the important structural information. If that is a little confusing don’t worry, I’m still not fully on top of it myself. What I do know though is that they can be very pretty. Whilst getting the hard structural information requires a fair amount of computation we can still draw some interesting conclusions about overall structural changes within a sample from changes in speckle position and intensity alone. It is quite nice that the data we collect is something you can physically see straight away.

Right science waffle over, hope you feel a little bit more enlightened in regards to my research and hopefully next time I post won’t be so far away.

Finally Fuji

Well this post is long, long, long overdue but I am finally getting around to writing it. Yes you read the title correctly After a year and a half in Japan I finally got around to summiting its largest peak, and what self –respecting mountain man would I be had I not. My journey up was a little a-typical (well the start at least) but all the more fun for it I think.

So where to begin? Well let’s start with the weekend before. I had an absolute blast at a music festival called Summer Sonic. This is probably one of the biggest music events of the year in Kansai and it was pretty cool. Four stages of (mostly) excellent music, lots of people and, at least on the second day, great weather.

 

The first day was incredible though for far different reasons. Mainly a huge thunderstorm broke out halfway through the day. I have seriously never been that close to lightning. It was scary, harrowing and amazing al at once. The crowd ended up holed inside a baseball stadium for a few hours, a little miserable and soggy, until the power came back on.

After about two an a half hours everything restarted and I still managed to be introduced to some interesting new bands as well as seeing some of my all time favourite artists. It was a fun experience and I’d been craving live music, there is a bit of a drought in my area, I think I need to really get into the Japanese music scene.

 

Anyway I’m getting a little sidetracked so now onto the journey to Fuji. It started with yet another night bus journey to Tokyo. Once there I met up with an old friend from the UK who would be my climbing partner for the night. Yup that’s right we decided to opt for the traditional night climb up Fuji-san to see the sunrise from the Summit.

Standing over 3700 metres, Fuji-san is the highest point in all of Japan. In fact it is not a mountain at all but an active volcano, although it’s been around 300 years since it last erupted. It’s fairly verdant on the way up most likely due to the rich nutrients in the surrounding soil. Being so massive it features heavily in much of Japanese folklore, songs, poetry and so on. It is probably one of Japans most Iconic symbols and I really couldn’t end my stay here without visiting.

That being said we set off from Shinjuku on the 3 hour journey by train and bus to Fujiyoshida before setting off up to the fifth station (河口湖五合目). Once we arrived we met a great deal of people also readying for the night climb. As I said it is a very popular way to climb Fuji and to be honest even if you were to set out on your own you wouldn’t be lonely for long.

The climb itself is just a long and steady march to the top. There are plenty of mountain huts along the way to take a breather if you need one, usually necessary after the particularly steep portions. This climb is in no way difficult and there are plenty of pensioners and young children also on the trail. I think most people opt to climb a little earlier and bed down in one of the mountain huts to wake up for sunrise. This is expensive though so we opted to plough through the night.

This is the highest I have ever climbed and I was a little surprised by how quick the temperature changed, I went from roasting to freezing in a couple of hours. The oxygen level difference was also noticeable though nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. One thing that really made me giggle however was the over the top nature of many Japanese climbers, stopping every five minutes to take massive gulps from their oxygen canisters. The top moment was seeing a group of guys all taking deep pulls from said canisters before lighting up a ciggy each. Priceless.

I was also surprised at just how many huts there are. Whilst really expensive they were a bit of a god send near the top where I was deffo in need of a hot drink or two, the cup of 甘酒 near the top was divine. We reached the summit in about 6 hours, about an hour of this was spent queuing to complete the last 100 metres, and after a brief wait were greeted by the sun.

It made all the struggle worth it. I can’t put into words what the view was like adequately and sadly my phone’s little camera could not do the sunrise justice. As the sun rises up over the mountains and if the sky is exceptionally clear, as it was for us, you can really see huge rays of light spiking out in a half circle across the landscape. It looks just like the Iconic flag of the Japanese military.

Thoroughly awed and a little bit chilly we started to make our way back down. The ascent had been a pleasant one but I cannot say the same for the descent. The path consists of what felt like an infinite number of short zig-zags leading back down to the 6^th station information hut. The view never changes and the path is made up of small ash shale, which is not firm underfoot. You could probably run it in about 40 minutes but I did not have the energy for that. This part seemed to go on forever.

 

Once we’d finally got back to Kawaguchiko-eki we treated ourselves to some amazing udon, it’s about twice as thick as normal udon in Kawaguchiko and called houtou udon. With warm food in our bellies we nodded of quickly on the train journey back to Tokyo for some hard earned rest.

I think I fully appreciate why this Japanese proverb exists, “He who climbs Fuji is a wise man, he who climbs twice is a fool.” The ascent was fine and dandy and the views were gorgeous but on the way down all I could think of was “I want off of this rock.” My choice of climbing conditions also weren’t the best I think and it took me a good few days to really recover from this.

Anyway that's it for now.

Ja mata ne.

Pack it up, Pack it in

Well in less than two days I’ll be on a flight bound to England. I can't wait I’ll not lie. No working horrendous hours. No crummy cafeteria. No more talking slowly. Sandwiches and all the other things I’ve been missing these past crazy nine months. So what did I do with my first full weekend in ages? Prepare my stuff? Clean the apartment? Hell no.

Actually Saturday was spent rather practically. I went into Himeji with a couple of friends to do some Christmas shopping. I hate shopping but I love hanging out so it went all right. Basically I just bought a lot of random weird Japanese stuff well thought out gifts for people. I also managed to check out a lovely little restaurant called Boabab that I’d heard about from a few people.

It’s a great little place, tucked away in one of Himeji’s side streets that does a wide variety of Asian food, though mainly focusing on Malaysian and Thai. This of course means spicy which makes for a happy Marcus. It was also an opportunity to meet some new people, friends of friends, and discover that apparently I ‘Just look a bit French’. Still not entirely sure what that means but I won’t take it to heart.

The next day I had an early start, as I needed to get to a nearby city called Ako for 8:30am. Naturally I stayed up all night watching the lunar eclipse from my balcony with a cup of hot chocolate so getting the 6:30 bus was a slight struggle. My sleeping pattern is never great after beamtime it’s hard to adjust back to being able to sleep more than a few hours a night.

 

Although I was thinking why am I up at this ungodly hour on that clear but cold day I kept reminding myself it was going to be worth it. I had the opportunity to take part in a small festival commemorating the story of the 47 ronin in which I would be dressed as one of the aforementioned 47.

What am I talking about? For the uninitiated I’ll give you a quick back-story. The tale of the 47 ronin is possibly one of the most famous, and hotly debated, tales of honor, loyalty, revenge and the Bushido code. The tale begins in the early 17^th century when the Daimyo Asano Naganori, after being goaded, assaulted the Shogunate official Kira Yoshinaka and was forced to commit ritual suicide (seppuku) as punishment.

 

47 of Asano’s samurai, now ronin, outraged at this turn of events began to plot revenge upon Kira to uphold their masters honor. So began two years of planning and careful consideration before they finally deemed the time right to act. They led an assault on Kira’s household eventually killing him before finally handing themselves in to the authorities, whom forced them to commit seppuku for the crime of murder.

It’s a really fantastic tale and I can’t do it justice here but then this blog is not about Japanese history. The event had been organized by Ako cities tourism board with the aim of having 47 overseas residents dressed up as samurai. The morning was spent getting kitted out in our samurai garb. It was pretty complicated and at first

I was worried that I’d be freezing due to the cold weather but it turned out to be pretty snug. There was of course a horde of old ladies on hand ready to tell us where everything went, as these outfits were quite complicated. My only real complaint was that the woven sandals hurt like hell. At the end we were given our sword although, disappointingly, we were asked not to draw them.

All dressed up we started the event by taking to the streets to meet with the locals. We were handed a large stack of flyers each to hand out as we wandered through central Ako. Everyone was really friendly and seemed like to have been informed beforehand of what was going on. In fact it turned out the reason everyone was so eager to get a flier was that it gave them a ticket for a raffle later in the day.

After finishing fliering we met up with a lovely old fella who was our designated tour guide for the day. He spoke decent English and was very knowledgeable about the sites of Ako showing us, amongst other things, the old sewage works, a well from the Edo period, a pretty impressive clock tower (complete with inset TV screen) and some of the most expensive pieces of woven art I’ve ever seen.

He finished off the tour by showing us around Kagaku temple where Asano’s remains are buried. There are some interesting artifacts in there including a display of all 47 ronin, a stone inscribed with a Haiku written by one of the 47, one of the oldest Buddha statues in Japan (from around 500AD and amazingly preserved) and a statue that looked something like a dragon-turtle inscribed with (I think) opposing Kanji though I’m not sure entirely of the significance as I didn’t fully understand the explanation.

We were then given some amezake, a kind of hot drink made from partially fermented rice mixed with ginger that's great on cold days, and some food from the nearby street stalls, before settling down to watch some performances by the locals. This included a performance from some local school children and some mock battles and martial art displays.

We then began the parade proper. First going back into the temple to say a blessing at Asano’s grave before proceeding to the castle. It’s all a bit of a blur from then on as we were whisked from location to location and having our photo’s taken and videos recorded. Definitely a mental experience but one I’m glad I’ve had.

Along the way I got chatting with a few other people, I do love to gab and meet new people. From the conversation I learned what the thing I was really missing about being home was. It’s not big and it’s not clever but actually I just miss being able to swear properly. Yeah that's right being able to chuck in a well-placed curse word and have people actually know what I’m saying will b kind of refreshing.

We finished up the day by visiting Ooishi shrine for another dedication and then coming face to face with ourselves, at least in statue form anyway. Finally we moved into the main site of the festival where were greeted by more locals and pulled up on stage to say our “ありがとう’s)　

After such a great and long day you’d think I’d have gone home right? Wrong. I continued my adventuring for the day by meeting some people in Kobe. There is a light festival here every year, know as the Kobe Luminarie, to commemorate the great Hanshin earthquake of 1995. There were only 2 days left to see it and as I had work on Monday this was my last chance for the year.

It was unsurprisingly full of people but what an amazing spectacle. Hundreds of thousands of lights were arranged into amazing patterns forming great arches down the central street of Motomachi and culminating in a large arena at the earthquake memorial park. The lights themselves were donated by the Italian government and each one is hand painted.

It was quite something to see and the music playing in the background gave the event an extra sense of grandeur, despite its somber nature. Thoroughly exhausted now we bundled back onto a train to head back to Himeji and bed. A packed but amazing weekend, now I’d better gets some real packing done.

Mata ne.

Enl(eye)tening

Well It's been like a week so I'm going to put up a new post. This one isn't japan related but I love a pun, possibly more than most, and this post is a tribute to my gammy eyes. For years I've had a weak left eye but I've just kind of got on with it. My vision wasn't great but it was managible so I just ignored it, silly  I know but I think thats how I work most of the time, I'm very much just  shut up and get on with it, something I'm almost certain I get from you dad :P.

Anyway a bit of background and some tasty tasty eye gore, you have been warned. So whats wrong with me. I have a condition known as Keratoconus (no not Kerry Catonus although i thought that was what the optician told me first time around). What this basically means is that the corneas of my eyes are cone shaped rather than rounded and so incident light is not refracted onto my retina properly, everything seems to be about the diffraction, refraction or reflection of photons of light with me at the mo.




Right so now a bit of a sciency bit. The treatment for this is to remove the top layer of cells from the cornea, they're dead anyway so it;s actually fairly straightforward. My eye was anesthetized and then washed with alcohol. I did have to watch it being scraped off though, that wasn't much fun :(. After that I had to lie still for 1 hour as drops of riboflavin were added to my eye every 5 minutes. The idead is that the riboflavin (or vitamin B2) will be used to cross link the keratin in the cornea, making it more rigid and so flattening and thickening it. Then hopefully normalish vision yay.

Of course you scrape off a load of cells from your eye it's like having a graze on your eyeball. Suffice to say I'm currently suffering alot of Itami no meh. It is a bit frustrating. I had the operation done on monday, can;t see anything out of my left eye of course and it;s a bit of a fight to keep my right eye open.

I can't really read, watch T.V. r do much of anything really. I'm able to right this post simply on the virtue that I don't really need to look at the keys. It's worth it in the long run though. It's funny in a way because I;d never have found out about this if it wasn't for frisbee. A couple of my mates noticed I always seemed to drop discs when they were on my left side and maybe I needed an eye test. I brushed it off the first couple of times but eventually went and pow. I could have gone blind if not for frisbee, what an awesome sport ey. Anyway time to go take it easy (whatever that means).