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!