It's over two months that I live with these people
and it has been quite an experience.
The first day, I was shown this:
and told: "you can use that for your personal projects, and there are a lot of spare parts over there". Now I guess that for a mathematician "personal projects" involve only a pen and a piece of paper; as for me, in addition to the pen and paper, I also need a computer, a printer, an internet connection but nothing more. So I politely declined their offer of using the equipment, thinking of the thousand ways I could hurt myself with a motor drill.
Here I saw the practical aspects of mechanical engineering research. It seems to me that, apart from the design phase, a large part of the students' time is devoted to the actual building and maintenance of the machines. I witnessed them routinely disassembling and assembling again some of their robots. Working with bits is much more convenient: bits don't break, they don't rot, they don't cost thousand of euros to duplicate.
The atmosphere in this lab is friendly and relaxed, compared to some horror stories I heard about other Japanese labs. There's a manga library and lots of Gundams around - I guess that this room is the world centre of gundam-mania.
There's the usual shortage of female engineers, the only woman here being a smart and tough Taiwanese - me, myself, I tend to be afraid of someone knowing both Chinese and Japanese. The dress code is fairly free, except when they dress up sharp and practice their best bows for the occasional "job seminar" of the company that will employ them for life.
It is true that people work long hours; most of them start at 10am and don't leave before 22 PM. As for lunch, they go buy a bento that is usually eaten in front of the monitor. The favourite bento is rice with either chicken or pork and a fried ball called michi that contains all the ingredients of the known universe.
They usually have some napping breaks through the day and consume an insane amount of coffee (also for Italian engineers standards) at every hour of the day. Here's a PhD student drinking its (hopefully) last cup of coffee at 22:55.
A couple of them usually sleep in the lab during the week. And of course, Saturday is a workday. Today is a national holyday, the emperor's birthday, but most of them are here. During New Year's, the biggest holyday in Japan, the university and the labs are open as usual. The working habits of Japanese professors shall not be described...
I cannot help but wonder whether this dedication to work is also paired by efficiency -
watashiwa... ehm... as for me, I
usually rejoice if I have one hour straight of "clear thinking"
in a day, and then I spend the rest of the time staring at the emptiness
of my own mind, or at the windows, if it's a clear day.
Through the windows, every day I see a man on a terrace on the building across the street,
in gentleman's clothes, practicing his swing for an hour.
Japanese people love golf (when they don't watch sumo or baseball) and it's a status symbol for salarymen. I guess that they're fascinated by the countless accessories needed for it: the right clubs, the right bags, the right clothes.. I've seen seven-story golf stores.
Among the students in the campus, popular hobbies include making soap bubbles at lunchtime and practicing juggling.
Japanese love to import symbols and traditions from America and Europe. In fact, I usually have deja vus while walking around Tokyo.
Here only about 0.5% of the people consider themselves Christian, so for Christmas - or should I say, kurisumasu - they're only in for the light decorations (which are so sugooooooiii) and the general atmosphere of merriness (which is so kawaaaaaaiii). When the Japanese imported Christmas, they found themselves with a lot of lights but without a deity, so they changed a bit the focus of the holyday and now Christmas Eve is just like Valentine day in the western world - aren't those lights romantic?
They also have a traditional Christmas Cake:
