[Fragmented due to size again]
Final few days.
How depressing.
I am now back in England. Yuck.
So what happened in my last few days in Japan?…
Monday 15th August 2011:
On Monday I woke up a little late as all the lab work was completed and I only had to go into the lab to write my report and presentation (which could have been done equally well in my room, but I wanted to see people as much as possible before I left!). I sat at my desk writing, and chatting to people most of the day. There were very few people in the office as everyone had gone home for the (O)Bon holiday – Davis didn’t bother showing up either, despite not being Japanese.
I forgot to go for lunch because I was working pretty hard, and so come 5pm I was starving, still feeling pretty sick, and tired – so I left.
When I got back to the apartment, I continued working on my presentation, reading it through in my head a few times. I was SO nervous. I had plenty to speak about but was finding it difficult to make everything flow in a logical order and was worried about people finding errors in my logic or experimental design. It’s pretty intimidating having to present your research infront of some of the leading experts in their field. Kuroda-sensee is effectively the Father of Systems Biology too, so it was kind of daunting.
After working on that for a while, I had a nap, then a shower, then headed out to meet the UTRIP guys for dinner. It was Anet’s last night in Tokyo so we’d decided to go out for sushi to celebrate. There were 7 of us in total who went (2 of them were TODAI students from the department of Astronomy) – it’s never a good idea to go as an uneven number really. There were no tables large enough for us all, and so instead of splitting into two smaller groups, they decided to take a table for 6, and for me to sit on a stool about a metre away because I wasn’t planning on eating anyway ’cause of my illness. I was a bit peeved to have to sit on my own, but I could understand them doing it because if I wasn’t going to eat anyway, it made more sense for them to all eat as a group. So yeah, I sat on the stool – too far away for conversation but close enough for awkwardness. In the end I had a couple of pieces of sushi anyway because it looked oishi, but I then left early. When feeling tired of feeling sick, and sick of feeling tired, the last thing you want is to sit in a restaurant on your own feeling awkward.
I said goodbye to Anet, and then went back to my room for an early night. And several more run-throughs of my presentation in my head.
Tuesday 16th August 2011:
A magnificent day. I woke up early (Yes, actually early – 6am. Not Sophie early.) and headed onto campus for my closing ceremony. I dressed up nicely because the certificates were going to be presented by the Dean of the Graduate School of Science, so I didn’t want to look scruffy.
I arrived at Hongo-Sanchome about an hour earlier than I needed to, so stopped off in Starbucks (I’ve been good recently – hadn’t gone in ages!) for a Frappuccino and some breakfast. Well… I say ‘breakfast’ – it was a sugar-coated cinnamon bun. Nutritious!
I then walked to the Department and waited for the ceremony. Stas was early too so we were chatting beforehand for a while.
When we went to the office, we met Soeda-san and the Associate Dean. We were told that the Dean himself was no longer able to attend, but that was alright. The ceremony was really nice regardless.
There were 5 students there for the ceremony: Me, Stas, Lin, Inna & Kyle. Davis came too (making the total 6) around 20 minutes late. He is usually late to everything, but I thought that going to the Dean’s office on time would perhaps be worthy of his tight schedule. But no. Apparantly not. We all received our certificates in turn. They were beautiful! Big, elegant certificates on lovely paper, presented in a velvet graduation folder. We then lined up together for some photographs.
After the ceremony, I headed up to my lab. I had bought the members of my lab some sweets and biscuits, so I left those on the table and then wrote a thank you letter via the mailing list to everyone there.
I did some last minute run-throughs of my presentation, made a few amendments to my report, and then sent a few emails.
At 4pm, it was time for the presentation! I was so nervous beforehand, and was scheduled to go first (which I am glad about). I stood up on the stage, prepped my slides, and began. I was even more nervous than I imagined I would be because 4 UTRIPpers had come to watch too!
It went well.
Honestly.
I was surprised. All the worry and uncertainty disappeared and I mananged to get through it without any slip-ups. I spoke for 20 minutes to.the.dot. which felt like a bit of an achievement. I also seemed to have people’s interest, and at the end, I was able to answer all of the questions thrown at me. Win.
I won’t say that it went perfectly, because I don’t believe that presentations ever do, but it certainly went much better than I anticipated, and by the end of it I was buzzing.
I sat down next to Anna, and Davis then went up to give his presentation.
I won’t comment on it too much, as my frustration at him for his lateness and attitude towards science has perh
aps made me a little biased. What I will say though is that I don’t think his went as well as he anticipated that it would, and afterwards some people had commented that it seemed he spent his presentation trying to give excuses as to why his experiment did not yield data (and why this wasn’t his fault), rather than discussing the data (or lack thereof) itself.
He also finished his presentation with this slide [inset to right] which, as I’m sure you can imagine, resulted in a bit of a backlash of questions, which then went on for around 20 minutes.
Anyway, after the presentations were finished (around 5:10 pm) I had a short while free before our leaving party. I cleared my desk, then popped to the Co-op shop to buy a University of Tokyo hoodie as a souvenir. It was really nice! Lovely quality, and it is grey with the school’s logo.
I went back to the lab, and said goodbye to a few of the lab members who couldn’t come to the party (Kubota-sensee couldn’t go, for example). Those of us who did go (around 9 or 10 of us) then met up by the door and headed to the restaurant. Our leaving party was in a really nice Chinese restaurant in Ueno. The inside was mirrored and massive, and seemed to go on forever. I sat next to Professor Kuroda and Saito-san.
We didn’t order individually, but each shared dishes amongst us so that we could try more things. My favourite was a curried prawn dish. N’yom.
It was nice, and I got to speak to some of the lab members that I hadn’t really had proper conversations with before. After the meal, we all headed outside and said our goodbyes. However, I then sort of jokingly said that I wasn’t ready to go home yet, and so some of the lab members decided to take us on an impromptu night out in Akihabara!
It was SO.MUCH.FUN!
Saito-san is apparantly a bit of a regular on the Akihabara scene, so knew some amazing places to go! They wanted to take us to a maid cafe but I mentioned that I’d already been so we changed the plan. Instead, we first went to an ‘Idol Club’ called “Dear Stage” [http://moejapan.jp/dearstage/] which is apparantly Akihabara’s most well known Otaku hangout.
It was the weirdest place I’ve ever been! It was a small, brightly coloured room with a stage (duh) to the side. It filled up pretty fast, and within about 10 minutes of us being there it was packed! The show then began! It consisted of about 5 very kawaii Japanese girls singing A-pop (Akihabara pop… about 15x more over the top than J-pop) and prancing around the stage in school girl costumes. Perhaps more interesting though, was the audience. It consisted of typical otaku boys all singing their hearts out and dancing like their lives depended on it!
Words cannot do it justice.
They were dancing completely in unison, using all the same dance moves as each other, despite most of them having their eyes closed and being so lost in the moment that I’m sure they didn’t realise there was a single other person in the room except for them and the singer. I’ve never seen anything like it.
The dance moves 
were bizarre. A friend later told me that they were based on traditional Japanese theatre art. I just thought they were hilarious. It’s a definite must-see.
When the show was over, we walked around Akihabara and eventually found a bar that Saito-san wanted to show us. On the way though, we passed many Maid cafes, including a ‘Vampire Maid Cafe’ which looked pretty interesting, and a bit more fetishist than the usual. We didn’t go in, but I took a picture of the guys outside the entrance. You can’t see the banner too well in this photo though.
We also found a bar that Saito-san described as “A place where women go to look at men who love men. The men wear underwear, and pretend to love each other”.
Now that sounded interesting. We didn’t go in though. Apparantly men aren’t allowed in unless they work there. At all.
So then we went to a CosPlay bar, which was essentially the same as any other bar in Tokyo except that the waitresses were walking around wearing costumes from famous Manga. There were a few generic nurses, maids, police officers, etc too.
We had a few drinks there, spoke to the waitresses (One of which was desperate to learn English so was talking to me for ages. She kept telling me I ‘look like Hermione’ which was not exactly accurate.) and then left. I got the train back to Ningyocho station and then walked the rest of the way home.
I was pretty tired, and not willing to risk missing the last train.
I had such an amazing night though! Wow. Just… wow!
pseudopsience 