i'm in japan or something

I visited Kyoto two days before I left Japan. It seemed like most of the other students who were studying abroad had done it, and they all said it was beautiful…so I thought it would be a good idea to go. A friend gave me the good advice of using an all-day bus pass to go to Fushimi Inari Taisha, Kiyomizu-dera, and Kinkaku-ji. I was able to go to the first two, but by the time I got to the last one, it was unfortunately too dark, so it was already closed. 

I took the Shinkansen to Kyoto. I made the mistake of ordering a “free ticket” instead of a “reserved seat ticket”; the day I went was a Friday, and it was apparently a holiday, so it was the first day of a 3-day weekend. Naturally, the Shinkansen wound up having many users going out for tourism, so…I ended up having to stand up on the train for the entire two or so hours going to Kyoto x___x

(Of course, I realized my mistake and bought a reserved-seat ticket on the way back)

Kyoto in general had a great feel to it. Like Hokkaido, there was a lot more nature in the area than in Tokyo. I took a train down towards Nara for a bit and got to see a lot of the countryside…it was very quiet and peaceful, and there weren’t really any tourists (again, much like Hokkaido). But the red autumn leaves, or kouyou, were definitely really nice to see…although, after a while, I was wondering, “…how long can I really just walk around taking pictures of red leaves before I get bored? .____.”

A friend asked me to go to Odaiba and take pictures of stuff, so I visited it during my last week in Japan (i.e., after I had finished all my classes).

In Odaiba, there was a giant model Gundam and a little “Gundam Cafe” next to it where I bought a bunch of Gundam stuff for friends back home. I don’t know much about Gundam, but I hope they like the stuff.

There was also a colorful Ferris wheel called the Daikanransha, which was very similar to the the Cosmo Clock 21 I saw at Yokohama.

The city in general reminded me a lot of Yokohama, with the nice air from the water and the generally relaxed atmosphere. It had a nice feel about it.

It’s been a while. Sorry.

I haven’t really done anything outside of school, and I didn’t want to keep posting feelings about school…because I could do that in America too, so that’d just be lame.

I had been avoiding going out on weekends simply because I’ve usually just been exhausted from the week, and also because…well, I don’t really have any options other than going out by myself, or playing with the tennis club I’m in. So I usually choose to stay in and sleep, watch YouTube videos, and do homework.

However, about a week or 2 ago, my Quantum Physics TA invited me to a community event (held on Saturday, October 13th) nearby ICU where we’d be helping little kids from the community celebrate Halloween (a little early, I know). I’m not sure why, but I didn’t even feel a single bit of resistance to her invitation…which is unusual for me. Perhaps it was because she went out of her way to talk to me. Perhaps it was because I wanted to interact with kids again. Perhaps it was because she’s female (okay so I lied, there’s ONE female in my science courses. But she’s not even a student, and she’s at least 30 years old…). But for whatever reason, I told her I’d do it…which was an interesting process in and of itself; since I was awkward when speaking Japanese with her in class, when she emailed me with the full event itinerary and invitation, she also tried her best to provide an English translation…so when I replied with good, not-crappy Japanese, saying “Thanks for the translation. I can actually read Japanese and mostly understand when I listen, but I suck at speaking…so you don’t have to translate every time” and whatnot, she kinda freaked out. 

At any rate, I biked down to ICU on Saturday.

just like this

The event was basically a little Halloween thing for some nearby community kids. The event was run by a bunch of adults from the nearby community, most of whom were parents of some of the kids. The helpers were Japanese youths, in their late teens and early 20s, and students studying abroad here in Japan (such as myself), most of whom were from the University of Electro-Communications (電気通信大学 Denki-Tsūshin Daigaku) and were in their mid-to-late 20s. A few of those students were invited by my Physics TA; she had apparently taught some of them in the past or something. At any rate, they were cool people too. Some were quite fluent in Japanese, and others not so much. But we all were able to work together and have fun with the kids and whatnot.

We first decorated the room that the kids would be using to do their little arts and crafts. Then we ate a little lunch, and waited for the kids to come. After the kids came, we separated into groups, and then helped the kids make these little crafts, visible in 1 or 2 of the pictures, I think (the little orange-and-black arch thingies). We then stayed in our respective groups, and went around the neighborhood “trick-or-treating”. It was actually going to 4 specific places in the neighborhood (a convalescent home, 2 homes of kids in the program, and 1 little shop…I recognized the guy at the shop from ICU, so that was cool), and at each place, the kids would do a little puzzle/game thing (singing a song to the old people, playing rock-paper-scissors with the guy at the shop, trivia, etc.), and then get candy after they finished/solved it or whatever. Afterwards, we headed back to the community center place, took pictures, and then said goodbye to the kids and cleaned up all the decorations. All of us helpers then ate a small meal together consisting of a bunch of various Japanese snacks, candies, and drinks, and talked with each other for a bit. This all went from about 11 AM to 6 PM.

The kids were pretty funny. They were mostly between the ages of 7 and 9, and they were pretty lively. There was this one noisy kid in my group who kept grabbing long twig things and tickling people with them, so me and the other helpers in my group trolled him by tickling him with little twig things and then hiding the twig things before he could turn around and see us.

I was really grateful to my Physics TA afterwards. In some Facebook chat correspondence after the event (chatting in Japanese, omg D:), I explained to her that I hadn’t really been able to make that many Japanese friends here (pretty much the only Japanese people here I’m really acquainted with besides my teachers and host family are some of the students in the tennis club I’m in. The tennis club people are really funny and kind, but I only see them once a week, and I don’t go out drinking with them, so I guess I’m not especially close to them…), so I really really appreciated her being so kind to me by going out of her way to invite me and whatnot, and that it made me feel a bit more welcome. She claimed that most Japanese people are just really shy, but because she is used to “rikei danshi” (guys who do science stuff…basically, nerds), she was much more “shameless” in approaching me and inviting me to the event. She said she’d like for me to meet her family (I think just a daughter and husband?) sometime, so I’ll try to do that before I go. I am glad that I made the effort to wake up early on Tuesdays and Thursdays to audit a class that I can’t even fully comprehend.

She mentioned that none of us who attended the event should post clear photos of the kids online (at least, not without their parents’ consent), because apparently people take photos of kids’ faces and swap them onto pornographic images. Because of that, I had to wait a few days to get her permission to upload the photos here with kids in them…she helped me crop out a kid’s face in one photo, and she said 3 of the photos that I wanted to use were just too clear to use at all, so there are no photos of us “trick-or-treating”. Sorry.

…Although, it made me think about all of my previous photo/video uploads of kids…but, my host families have seen my blog, so I think I’m okay. Though I still went back and changed the privacy settings on my related Facebook uploads…
*sigh*


I spent like 2 or 3 hours playing with my host mom’s 1-year-old granddaughter on Sunday. It made me want to have kids someday.

A friend asked that I do a blog post about what I’ve learned in my Quantum Physics. Unfortunately, I can’t say I’ve learned too much…the math quickly turned into stuff that I’ve never done before, and I don’t have the time/skills to go and learn it on my own. But here’s a list of all the stuff I should know (stuff I more-or-less understand is bolded):

• Wien’s Law
• Rayleigh-Jeans Law
• de Broglie wavelength
• Hamiltonian
• wavefunctions (still a bit iffy though)
• Schrodinger Equation
• Ehrenfest theorem
• Kronecker Delta
• Harmonic oscillators
• Fourier analysis
• Delta functions/Delta-function potential
• Potential wells (namely, the finite square well. I sorta get it, but…not really.)
• Hilbert space
• Hermitian Operators/Hermite polynomials
• Determinate states
• Eigenfunctions of a Hermitian Operator
• Discrete Spectra and Continuous SPectra
• Dirac Orthonormality
• The (generalized) Uncertainty Principle (I mostly get it…I think)
• Gram-Schmidt Process
• Fourier Transform (…conceptually, but I still don’t feel comfortable/confident using it)
• Compatible/Incompatible Observables
• Dirac Notation
• Projection Operator

And as for my Quantum Computing seminar…here’s the stuff I should know. Stuff I mostly understand is bolded:

• Quantum bits (“qubits”)
• Quantum parallelism
• Interference
• Polarization
• Dirac notation (Bra/ket notation)
• Quantum key distribution
• Tensor products
• Entangled states
• The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox
• Hidden variable theory
• Quantum Gates (represented as linear transformations)
• The basic unitary matrices: I, X, Y, and Z
• Controlled-NOT gate
• Controlled-Controlled NOT gate
• Toffoli Gate
• Fredkin gate
• Walsh-Hadamard Transform
• No-Cloning Theorem
• Quantum teleportation
• Dense coding
• Universal Quantum Turing Machine
• Mathematical Representation of the Complete Set of Quantum Gates
• Register addition and result generation
• Truth table generation
• Deutsch Algorithm/Deustch-Josza algorithm
• Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm
• Simon’s algorithm
• Shor’s polynomial time factoring algorithm
• RSA algorithm (I sorta learned about this in Discrete last semester…oops)
• Quantum Fourier Transform
• Grover’s search algorithm

So…yeah.

Also, I found this awesome Adventure Time fan art the other day. Couldn’t find the artist, but it is awesome and definitely wallpaper-worthy.

:O

Maybe the last video/photo I’ll be uploading for a while, with school starting at whatnot.

By popular demand…MY HOST MOTHER’S 1-YEAR-OLD GRANDDAUGHTER, YUNE!!

Song is “Eight Melodies (Toy Piano Version SFX)” from MOTHER (aka “Earthbound Zero”).

Back in Tokyo now. The Hokkaido homestay program was fantastic. My homestay was incredibly hospitable, and I am glad I got to meet them…they were a great family.

My host dad gave me a big envelope on the last day. Inside it was a big picture of me and the 5th grade class that I visited, along with a bunch of origami and two letters from some of the students. They had made something for me after all…hahahaha.

On our second-to-last day, we visited a historical Japanese building that apparently belonged to the shogun or something. It holds a museum now.

Afterwards, we went to a tea ceremony. It was painful because my legs are long, so the ladies gave me a chair.

Finally, we went to the youth center, where we met some people from the area who were sort of around our age range (the oldest person was like 37…youngest was about 17). There was a dance team who did this interesting “dragon dance” thing that looked a lot like stuff out of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

On the last day, we used the potatoes we dug up a few days prior to make various Japanese foods. It was tasty.

That night, my host family took me to see the night view of Hakodate from atop Mount Hakodate. Hakodate’s night skyline is apparently ranked 3rd in the world, after Hong Kong and Naples. It was really pretty.

On Saturday, we had a big farewell party which included a speech contest, various musical performances (including me and some of the Chinese students singing “Tong Hua”…-___-), and everyone doing the Ika Odori at the end.

After saying goodbye to our host families, we eventually took a bus to the airport and flew back to Tokyo.

Upon my return, my Tokyo host mother promptly stuffed me with dinner, and even moreso with brunch this morning. I am looking forward to the next 3 months.

Tomorrow, I have orientation for school.

SO IT BEGINS.

Clips from today’s elementary school visit.

The first clip is of the “Ika Odori” (“Squid Dance”) that apparently everyone in Hakodate knows. They showed us how to do it afterwards.

Next is a clip of one of the games my 5th grade class played. Each student is assigned a word (first round we used Japanese colors assigned by the teacher, second round we used Chinese greetings selected by the Taiwanese girl assigned to that class with me, and third round we used random English words and phrases selected by me), and if your word is called by the student in the middle, then you have to get up and quickly find another seat. If you don’t find a seat, then you have to go to the middle and say a few sentences in English. That kid in the white shirt kept posing for my camera.

Next clip, some of the kids from my class had come downstairs to say goodbye. They wouldn’t stop waving and jumping…aaahh.

After that is recess (as we were leaving the school). A lot of the kids were playing soccer. The music was actually coming from the school…

The last few clips are of my host mom’s friend and her kids (with my host mom’s kids). In the first one, my host mom is showing one of them the little swing they set up in the living room. Next clip, the cute little baby crawled around, and then the moms asked the two older boys to sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” to show/practice their English-speaking skills. At the end of that clip, my host mom’s friend asked me to join them…which is why I make an awkward appearance in the last clip .____.

Today, we visited the local elementary school where my host dad teaches. It had many many more kids than the last elementary/middle school we went too, so we were assigned 1 or 2 each to a classroom. I was assigned to the 5th grade class that my host dad teaches.

The kids were really excited to see us. First, we met in the gym where we said our names to the kids, and then they taught us a little dance…”Ika Odori”, or “The Squid Dance”; as mentioned in a previous post, the squid is Hakodate’s city animal, so it’s like…a dance that everyone is supposed to know or something.

We then broke up to our respective classrooms. We were told by the people in charge of our program that we’d have to talk for 15 minutes, with 5 or 10 minutes being an introduction to our home country, and then the remaining time being for questions…but it was much much simpler than that. We basically said our names, home countries, hobbies, and a small fact about our respective countries (like, a minute or 2 each). The rest was just the kids asking us questions, and then playing a variety of games with the class, and eventually eating lunch and then leaving.

The kids start learning English around 4th or 5th grade, so with me being an American and whatnot, I was asked to teach them a few words (or rather, show them the “correct pronunciation”, rather than their Engrish pronunciation). Every time I said a word, they were all said “OoooOooooOOOOoo”. It was the first time I ever felt special for knowing English.

One of the boys kancho‘d his friend like 3 times during lunch. Another little boy kept trying to tickle me. They reminded me of how I often poke(d) people. Except not in the butt.

A lot of the kids gave presents, such as origami, drawings, photos, and little crafts to those of us in the program who visited. My kids didn’t make any for me and the other girl with me…but it’s okay. I took a lot of pictures.

Like yesterday, saying goodbye took a while. They kept waving and asking for high fives and handshakes as we were leaving…ahhh, kids.

When I got back home, my host mom told me that her friend and her friend’s kids would be coming over. She said that I would probably be the first foreigner they had met, so it’d be a good experience for them.

The kids were really nice. The mom kept asking them to try to practice their English with me (e.g., saying “thank you”, “how old are you”, etc.). They were really nice kids…a 7-year-old boy (in Hayato’s class), a 4-year-old boy (in Tsucchan’s kindergarten), and an almost 1-year-old baby girl. They even gave me some presents…origami paper, chopsticks, and some manjuu. The kids were making some origami things (well, just paper airplanes), and my host mom asked if I could do any origami…so I made a pegasus thing that I used to make all the time a few years ago. I was surprised that I even remembered.

Now they keep saying I’m Japanese.