Month: February 2025

Tuesday 25 February

We woke up with the sunrise around 07:00 this morning. I ran down to the 7-11 to get some quick breakfast items: onigiri for me and a red bean paste bun for my wife She wanted a smooth paste bun, but they only had the coarse ones, so I got one of them and also grabbed a pack of “peanut cream” buns, thinking they’d be something like peanut butter inside. But she said they’d probably be some sort of peanut flavoured whipped cream, which on reflection I guessed was probably right.

She was going out with her mother and sister today to Ginza to look around at the shops and to attend their tea ceremony which we’d booked, at 11:00. I had the first day of my ISO Photography Standards meeting. I’d checked last night and discovered it was only two stops away on the train, but also only a 30-minute walk from our hotel. So I chose to walk there, rather than brave the rush hour trains for a five minute ride.

It was a pleasant walk, mostly through office areas. I noticed in front of several buildings were workers with plastic bags and long tongs, picking up tiny pieces of rubbish from the footpaths and surrounding areas. It looked like they got office workers to go out and do a few minutes of picking up stuff to clean the area around their building before heading in to start work for the day. I passed a primary school, where a man who looked like the principal, dressed in a suit, greeting all the kids and saying good morning (in Japanese) as they arrived. I took my time as I arrived and took a few photos of the canals that I walked over.

I reached the CIPA office building in good time, and met Eric outside, who misremembered where the entrance was, but we found it and went up to the third floor for the meeting.

We started the meeting at 9:00, welcomed by our new convener, Katoh-san, who has taken over from Scott who ended his term in Sydney last October. There are free drinks here from a vending machine, and a huge array of sweet and savoury snacks.

They’re not providing lunch though, but there are plenty of restaurants and convenience stores nearby to get food.

The morning session was administrative stuff and planning for future meetings. Dietmar from Germany is also running a perceptual experiment and asking meeting attendees to participate as observers. I was the first one to do the experiment in the first coffee break. He had three photos— one of sushi, one of a landscape (which looked like Scotland), one of three people’s faces—and was asking me to judge which image in a sequence of progressively more degraded images would be the last one I’d feel happy hanging on a wall as an artistic image. The degradations were chroma, exposure, noise, resolution, and texture. I’m very fussy with imperfections in photos intended for display, so I chose ones very early in the degradation series of ten levels, usually picking only level 1 or 2 as the last acceptable one, which prompted a comment from Dietmar that I was indeed very fussy with them.

At the lunch break I suggested to Atsushi-san that we could go get lunch together. He had invited us to dinner with his wife in Yokohama last time we were in Japan, and we had some email exchanges before this trip to try to organise something, but his wife ended up travelling this week, and then with my in-laws on this trip I organised some restaurant bookings for us, and so dinner with Atsushi kind of fell through. So I thought I better have lunch with him today! He took me a short way to Teuchi Soba Shibata, a small place that did soba and udon noodles. I did suggest ramen, and we passed two ramen places, but both had long queues out the door, whereas the soba place we got a table right away. The menu was in handwritten Japanese calligraphy, which he translated for me. There were only a few dishes, and I chose the hot udon noodles with curry, which turned out to be minced pork and some vegetables over rice. It was pretty good and inexpensive too.

Back at the meeting, we had technical sessions on image stabilisation and vocabulary definitions. These were shorter than scheduled and we ended with an extra hour for a break before beginning work on machine vision image characterisation. During the extra break I went for a walk and explored some of the surrounding streets of Shibaura, in the area of restaurants on the island south of Tamachi Station. There are plenty of little restaurants around that look good for lunch over the next few days, but ordering without knowing Japanese may be a problem.

After this break we reassembled for the technical session on machine vision, the last session of the day. There was a social dinner function tonight for the meeting attendees, but I skipped it to walk back to the hotel and meet up with my family for our own dinner. T. was a bit worn out from spending the day shopping in Ginza, so decided to stay at the hotel and get dinner on her own, while the rest of us headed out to our booking at Kakekomi Gyoza in Shinjuku.

The others had had a traditional tea ceremony booked in Ginza for today, but my wife told me that there was a mix-up and they had prepared at the venue at Asakusa, not Ginza. The company offered to pay for a taxi to take them to Asakusa, but they declined, since they wanted to spend time in Ginza afterwards. The company sent my wife an apology email and said they’d refund their booking fee. But apart from that disappointment, they had a good day in Ginza.

We headed on the train to Shinjuku, a place I’ve never visited before in Tokyo. During the meeting I wanted to find the best station exit to get to our restaurant, and looked it up online, only to learn that Shinjuku is the busiest train station in the whole world, and has over 200 different exits! I assume most of those are different doors in connected shopping complexes with underground passages. I determined there are only about five main exits, and we wanted the East Exit. Navigating to the exit was a little tricky, but fortunately the signs were clear enough. From there, walking to the restaurant was very interesting, as the streets were alive with neon lights, video screens, and other illumination, and busy with thousands of people walking around.

We found the restaurant and entered. It was a small place with seating for maybe 12 people on the ground floor, and a tight wrought iron spiral staircase leading to an upper floor. The guy asked us immediately if we had a reservation, and showed us to a small table near the open kitchen area. Honestly, it would have been a very tight fit with my mother-in-law there as well, but with just three of us it was manageable.

We browsed the iPad menu (in English) and selected a plate of vegan gyoza for my wife, one of traditional pan-fried gyoza, and one of deep-fried (karaage) gyoza for my sister-in-law and me. We also ordered drinks, as it was mandatory for everyone to order at least one drink. We used small dishes for dipping sauce and gobbled down the delicious gyozas. We decided on a small serve of honey mustard gyoza and a bowl of cabbage salad to completely fill us up. Everything was really good, including the experience and ambience, and it was incredibly cheap too, coming to only 4500 yen for the three of us.

Finished with dinner, we walked back to Shinjuku Station via a different street and boarded a train back to Shibuya, to see the iconic crossing at night. We walked across and then went up into the Starbucks on the opposite corner to get a view from the first floor windows. We didn’t spend too long here, before returning to the station to get another train back to Shinagawa and our hotels.

my sister-in-law left us there, but my wife and I walked across to the wast side of the station and the food shops there. She got an Earl Grey scone for dessert from City Bakery, while I explored the place across the way, and ended up getting a cinnamon rugelach to take back to the hotel room for dessert. So supplied, we headed back and in for the night, stopping on the way to get some breakfast supplies from the 7-11, so we don’t have to buy them in the morning.

We have an early start tomorrow!

Monday 24 February

This morning we got up and prepared for our day trip to Kawazu, down the coast on the Izu peninsula. We met my sister- and mother-in-law in the hotel lobby just before 07:00 and walked across to Shinagawa Station, and to City Bakery. We sat at a table and ordered some breakfast. I had scrambled eggs on toast with smoked salmon, and a pain au chocolat. My wife just had a wholemeal croissant with cappuccino, but had bought a mixed berry scone to take with us for later. The eggs were good, but the pain au chocolat was a bit disappointing, being quite ready and not very flaky.

We headed to JR platform 12 for our train departing at 08:07 for Kawazu. It was a limited express service down the Izu Peninsula, stopping only a couple of times near Tokyo, but later in the journey stopping a bit more frequently at the larger towns dotted down the coast. We arrived at Kawazu at 10:30, with many others on the train disembarking there too. The station was decked out in pink sakura festival decorations and posters.

We walked south a couple of blocks to the river, along whose banks the sakura trees were just coming into bloom. It turned out we were probably a few days too early. There were some blossoms out in full bloom, but most of the buds on the trees had not yet opened. The route west along the river was busy with visitors, but not as crowded as I’d expected.

The way was also lined with dozens of food stalls serving various snacks and meals: grilled skewers of meats and seafood, skewers of mochi balls, dango, takoyaki, noodles, fried potato things, sausages, and much more. There was also a lot of pink food with sakura flavour, including sakura much, sakura udon noodles, and sakura latte drinks.

We walked about halfway up the riverside sakura area, past a small park where some people were sitting and soaking their bare feet in steaming hot water under a roof shelter. The air was very cold, and when some grey cloud came in it started snowing! It wasn’t very much, and the pellets of snow melted as soon as they landed on most things, but we saw small bits of ice collected on our coats and hats. It was never more than a light sprinkle and didn’t last long either, but continued on and off at intervals through the day. Still, I was pretty excited as it’s the first time I’ve ever seen snow falling in my life.

I bought some takoyaki to eat, but they were a bit disappointing – not made fresh to order, but as I discovered pre-made and taken from the heated display. My wife bought us some sakura mochi, wrapped in shiso leaf and grilled until just a bit crisp on the outside. That was very pink tasting, but pretty good and warming in the cold weather. She also got herself a sakura milk latte, which she said was very sweet. And I ate a breadstick which my wife had bought for me at breakfast, with chocolate chips, ginger, and lime – an interesting combination of flavours, but which worked very well.

We wandered off the river bank towards the main street of the town to find a cafe to sit inside and for the others to have some coffee. We ran across Cafe Ailana, a tiny cafe built onto the front of the owner’s house, with only four tables and eight seats inside. We were about to pass it in search of somewhere that made tea, but when I searched Google Maps for nearby cafes it showed that Ailana had the best rated coffee in town, which was enough to convince my co-travellers to try it. It was cosy, and had a turntable and dozens fo jazz albums on vinyl, although the jazz that was playing seemed to come from some other source. The menu was entirely in Japanese and I used Google Translate to determine it was essentially half a dozen different blends of coffees, plus a glass of freshly squeezed mandarin juice, as the only drink options. They also has chiffon cake slices and small scones. The others all ordered the “most popular” coffee blend, while I got the juice. The owner prepared the coffee intricately using a hand-poured drip filter. They all declared that it was indeed extremely good coffee. My juice was very good too.

We separated, my in-laws heading down the street back to the station to take it easy and look at some shops before meeting me and my wife back at the station for our return train. We, on the other hand, trekked further up the river to the original Kawazu Zakura tree, still standing in the front yard of Mr. Katsumi Iida’s house, where he planted it some time around 1955, from a seedling he found. This tree turned out to be a mutant cultivar which bloomed very early, and was propagated to produce the early blooming sakura trees of Kawazu. This tree, it turned out, was indeed in full bloom, perhaps thanks to a sunny and warm position unlike the slightly slower ones lining the river banks.

Having seen this, we headed back to town via a footpath that led through small fields planted with vegetables and fruit trees, with an occasional flowering sakura here and there. This was a great walk, showing us a more rural lifestyle and landscape.

We met up with my in-laws at the station, where we waited for our return train to Shinagawa, departing at 15:44. It was bang on time, and we settled in for the journey back. The sun went down as we approached Yokohama, rendering the sky and the sea coast beautiful with muted pink colours.

Once back at the hotel, we agreed to meet at 19:00 for dinner at the nearby Obica restaurant just a short walk away. This is a restaurant that originated in Rome, where my wife and I had dined on a previous trip. We ordered a couple of pizzas to share, one simple tomato, buffalo mozzarella, and basil leaves, and one with prosciutto and piled high with mixed spinach and rocket leaves. After finishing these, I had a slice of a chocolate almond cake, while T. ate the accompanying cherry gelato that came with it.

Then we retired back to our rooms for the night. Tomorrow, I have to begin my work section of the trip!

Sunday 23 February

My wife and I got up a bit before 07:00, after only a semi-restful sleep, which is sort of usual the first night away on a trip. Her mother and sister were already up and keen to head to Haneda to pick up their missing luggage. We got ready and headed off about 07:30. We walked back to Shinagawa Station and caught the Keikyu line train back to Haneda Airport. There we went to the information desk on the arrivals level and asked where we could speak to a Japan Airlines representative about claiming the luggage. The woman at the desk very helpfully phoned the information number that my sister-in-law had been given, and spoke to someone there, who said they would come out to speak with us. As it turned out, they appeared a few minutes later with the luggage. We just had to sign a form and we were on our way back to the hotel again.

We got in around 08:30. the others went up to their room with the luggage to have showers and freshen up, while my wife and I went back to the Japan Rail ticket office in Shinagawa Station to pick up our booked tickets for tomorrow’s train journey to Kawazu. A helpful man there showed us how to scan the QR codes we had with a machine to print the tickets, and he gave us a small folder to put them in as well.

Then we explored the station a little to try and find a place where my wife could get some coffee. We found what looks like a new place since we were there two years ago, called City Bakery. They had coffee and baked goods, and also did hot breakfast meals as we saw people having scrambled eggs and French toast. We thought this might be a good place to have breakfast tomorrow before leaving on our train trip to Kawazu, and confirmed they’d be open at 07:00, giving us an hour to have breakfast.

My wife had a mixed berry scone and I tried a pretzel croissant, which was exactly as advertised, very much a cross between a pretzel and a croissant in flavours and textures. By the time we had these and got back to the hotel, her mother and sister were ready to leave for the day.

We all went back to Shinagawa Station and caught a Yamanote line train to Harajuku. As we boarded the train, I felt a tap on the shoulder and a voice say, “David!” I turned around and right behind me was Paul H., the Apple representative on the ISO Photography Standards committee. Obviously he’s in Tokyo for our meeting beginning on Tuesday, but imagine the odds of randomly running into someone you know, from the USA, in Tokyo. He caught the train with us and mentioned he was planning on going skiing tomorrow. He stayed on the train when we alighted at Harajuku.

We exited the west gate of the station into the park surrounding the Meiji Jingu shrine. We walked along the path under the two huge tori gates, one near the station and the second a few hundred metres down the path and around a corner.

Along the way we passed the stacked sake barrels, wrapped in reeds and colourfully decorated with the emblems of various sake brewers across Japan. These are sent here as offerings to the spirit of the Meiji Emperor. Across the path from them are wooden barrels sent by French wineries in a similar tribute.

As we approached the shrine complex, uniformed guards appeared and ushered everyone to one side of the walking path. We wondered why, and then heard rhythmic tramping of feet on the crushed gravel central section of the path. Coming around the corner from the shrine towards us was a procession of monks, dressed in white, with large black shoes. Maybe 30 or 40 of them passed by, the way we had come. After they passed, the path was free to use again, and we proceeded to the shrine.

Here I washed my hands with the water at the purification area, but the others declined to do so in the very cold weather. Fair enough, my hands were freezing and it took them several minutes to dry. We wandered around the shrine, taking photos and looking at the sights. The day was very cold, but sunny, and it wasn’t actually too chilly underneath the trees of the park. When we were unsheltered and the wind blew, it was really bitter. We saw what looked like a wedding party in the shrine, with a man in a suit posing next to a woman dressed in a kimono, and three other young women in kimonos standing near them.

We decided not to explore the shrine gardens, as it was getting close to lunch time, and my mother-in-law desired a rest for a bit. So we just walked back to Harajuku Station and caught the train one stop to Shibuya. We stopped to look at the Hachiko statue, then crossed the iconic scramble crossing to a cafe I noticed on the upper floors above L’Occitane, being the L’Occitane Cafe. I was worried it might have a long queue for a table, but when we got there they showed us to a table straight away. They had light lunch menu items, none of which were vegetarian, but my wife requested to see if they could do the waffle croquet monsieur without the ham, and was told that would be fine. So she got that, while I chose a lighter option of what was essentially a caesar salad, just without any dressing. The cafe had an okay view of the Shibuya crossing scramble, but not from the best angle and slightly blocked by a tree. The food was good though, and I was very happy to have found somewhere for lunch that could do something vegetarian.

After this we walked down one of the shopping streets to explore and see the sights. It was fascinating for my mother- and sister-in-law, who haven’t been to Japan before. We walked a few blocks and then returned in a loop to head over to the Shibuya Scramble Square building for our 14:40 entrance to the Shibuya Sky observation deck. We had some minutes to spare, and found the ground floor level of the building to be full of gourmet cakes, chocolates, and other sweets, so we spent some time in there looking around. My wife bought a mocha sweet with red bean paste, and her mother bought herself some caramel treats.

We went to the Shibuya Sky entrance a few minutes early and were ushered into the lift which took us to the 14th floor lobby where another lift took us non-stop to the 45th floor. We emerged into a bright blue sky, on an open air level with glass walls affording a spectacular 360° view of Tokyo all around us. The open level is actually split into two levels, with one corner a floor lower and connected to the indoor observation level below. We spent several minutes outside, soaking in the view. There were dozens of other people there as well, but not enough that it felt crowded. The corner spots were coveted for photos of people standing against the backdrop of the city below, with queues of people waiting at each corner to take photos there.

After a while we went into the indoor level and found a couple of seats near the bar. We managed to get sitting space on an adjacent lounge for me and my wife so we could all sit relatively close, but it was busy enough that it was impossible to find any better seating for the four of us. We got some drinks from the bar and a bag of spiced nuts to nibble on. We sat and rested and waited for the sunset, which was at 17:30. It set behind heavy grey cloud that was obscuring Mount Fuji in the distance, although we could see some of the smaller mountains next to it. As sunset approached, the sun appeared below the cloud and painted the city beneath us red in its glow.

After sunset, we left Shibuya Sky and caught the train back to Harajuku. We walked down Takeshita Street, which was quite an experience. I’ve never been to this part of Tokyo before and wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It’s full of cutesy stores and cafes and young people’s fashion and street food stalls selling lots of fried things and sugary desserts.

Beyond this we entered a quieter back streets area and found our dinner venue: Sakura Tei okonomiyaki. We got our reserved table and ordered some food, which arrives uncooked in bowls for you to mix yourself and cook on the large hotplate in the middle of the table. My wife and I showed her mother and sister how to do the cooking, and we enjoyed the meal and the experience immensely.

After this we walked back to Harajuku Station. I got a banana caramel cheesecake crepe for dessert from one of the numerous fancy crepe places that serves it wrapped in a cone for eating on the street. It was delicious.

Then we caught a train back to the hotel to turn in for a relatively early night. We need to be up early tomorrow for breakfast before our train trip to Kawazu.

Saturday 22 February, 2025

This morning we got up, had some breakfast, finished packing our bags, and headed off to the airport on the train. We got there about 09:30 and went straight in through immigration and security scanning. This took a little while as the airport was a bit busy, but not too bad.

However once we got inside we were surprised at how busy the terminal was. The last few times we’ve flown out of Sydney, it’s been fairly quiet, but today there were crowds of people and it was hard to find a table or seats near any of the dining and shopping areas. We met up with my wife’s mother and sister, who are travelling with us on this trip. They were having coffee and a snack in a cafe there.

We moved to some seats near one of the departure gates, where I spent several minutes on my phone filling out the Japanese customs and immigration form online. It requires all sorts of things like the address and phone number of the hotel you’re staying at. I tried to do this yesterday at home, but got frustrated by not being able to log in or to reset my password. I got around that by creating a new account – perhaps the old account was deleted since the last time I used it was over a year ago.

We boarded our flight, which was due to leave at midday. However we were still sitting on the ground at 13:00. Initially (around 12:30) the captain said this was due to some “automatic flight navigation” or something system not working, and that they wouldn’t know if it would be working or not until we were in the air! If it did work, our flight time would be 9.5 hours, but if it didn’t come online, the flight time would be 11 hours! I have no idea how this sort of thing could be true, but that’s what he said. But when we still hadn’t departed half an hour later, the captain announced that the extra delay was because of some cargo having to be reshuffled. We didn’t realise it then but this was an ominous portent. We took off over an hour late.

We had a good view of the city as we climbed out of Sydney.

Whatever that navigation thing was, they managed to get it fixed, because our flight time was just 9 and a bit hours, managing to get us on the ground at Haneda Airport 20:30 local time (22:30 Sydney). We thought the worst was over. Haha.

My wife and I only had carry-on bags, but her mother and sister checked luggage. So we waited at the carousel, but there was an odd sign there saying something about some luggage not being there and if your bags didn’t show up, go see the adjacent JAL staff. Sure enough, when the flow of luggage stopped, my wife’s mother and sister didn’t have theirs.

They talked to a JAL staff member and learnt that their luggage had been unloaded because the plane was too heavy, and was still at Sydney! It will be flown to Tokyo overnight and available for pickup at the airport after 07:30 tomorrow. Or they could have it delivered to our hotel which at first they thought would be best, and spent about half an hour going through details of the hotel and also a bunch of customs declaration stuff, and the staff said the bags might be opened and searched, etc, etc. And then after all this they said that it would take up to 24 hours to deliver the luggage to the hotel! So they decided it would be easier if we just go back to the airport first thing in the morning and get the luggage ourselves.

Fortunately we don’t have a super busy day planned tomorrow, and a late start won’t really disrupt anything.

We finally left Haneda Airport after 22:00, more than an hour and a half after arriving. We got a train from there to Shinagawa and walked the short distance to our hotel. It was really cold! We stopped at the 7-11 near the hotel for the others to buy some toothbrushes and other toiletries, since theirs were in their missing luggage. The we checked in and prepped for bed.

There’s not much more to do before my flight to Tokyo tomorrow. I checked in online and got our boarding passes issued. I’m just filling in a health questionnaire for visiting Japan on their government web site. For dinner I used up the last of our perishable foodstuffs. And this evening we took Scully over to a friend’s place for them to dogsit while we’re away.

I did my last four ethics classes for the time being. And I also cleaned the house, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, refilling the damp absorbers, changing and washing bed linen, etc, etc. I did this last time we went on a trip and it was so nice coming home to a clean home that I thought I’d do it again.

Also today, the last Irregular Webcomic! strip went live. I expect I’ll get some emails about it tomorrow, but won’t have time to answer any until I get back from Japan.

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! #5380
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #5757
• Comments on a Postcard #5811

Today in between five ethics classes I did some more preparation for departure for japan on Saturday. There’s only a few minor things left, but I organised some more printed tickets, and figured out what electrical adapters we need for phone chargers and the laptop I’ll use for taking notes during the ISO meetings. This was non-trivial as I’ve updated my phone since our last trip, and it now uses the USB-C charging cable, which doesn’t plug into the old USB chargers we have that have the interchangeable plugs for different countries. We only have USB-C chargers in Australian plugs. But I swapped my convertor from the laptop charger and used a Japan interchangeable plug for that, so I think we’re good without having to buy any extra cables or convertors.

At lunch I walked with Scully over to Naremburn and treated myself to a slice of carrot cake. It’s a longer walk than I’ve been doing recently because of the hot weather, but today was cooler and overcast, so it was a good opportunity.

Oh, I also started writing up the last D&D adventure log from the session we played two weeks ago. I haven’t finished it yet, but got a fair amount written. I’ll see if I have enough time to finish it tomorrow, before my trip.

New content today:

• Darths & Droids #2586
• Irregular Webcomic! #5379
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #5756
• iToons #924
• Comments on a Postcard #5810