Thursday 27 February
We had a leisurely start this morning, getting ready and planning to meet my in-laws at 08:00 for breakfast. We met up and walked over to the City Bakery at Shinagawa Station. We managed to get a table together after a man moved to make way for us. I had scrambled eggs with prosciutto, while the others had baked goods and coffee.
We headed off to catch a train about 09:00, taking the through train on the Keikyu Line to the Asakusa subway line, and alighting at Asakusa Station. My sister-in-law had looked up a cafe that does intricate three-dimensional caffe latte art and wanted to check it out, and it was only a few steps from one of the subway exits, so we walked there, but discovered the place indicated by Google Maps was an empty building! Oh well.
We continued on to the Kaminarimon Gate and then through it to the array of market stall shops beyond. The area was bustling with tourists, though not nearly as crowded as last time M. and I were here in summer, and of course nowhere near as uncomfortably hot. We browsed slowly along the shops, with the others buying a few things along the way.
Eventually we reached the Senso-ji temple. Last time my wife and I were here, the crowds and the weather made us turn back before even going in to see the temple. But today was a lot better and we entered through the huge gate leading into the main courtyard. This Buddhist temple was very different from the Shinto shrine of Meiji Jingu. Here instead of purchasing offerings you could buy fortunes, randomised by shaking a tube of numbered sticks and then taking a printed fortune from a matching numbered drawer. My wife got one and drew a “regular fortune”. The instructions printed near the fortune area said if you get a good fortune you should take it with you, whereas if you get a bad fortune you should tie the paper to nearby racks to leave the bad luck behind you.
We exited to the west side of the main building into the surrounding gardens. These were not very large, but contained well-kept hedges and trees, and a lot of statues, carvings, stone lanterns, smaller outbuildings, and standing stones carved with masses of Japanese text. Reading the informational signs revealed that some of these objects were hundreds of years old, with one stone thought to have been made as far back as 1150.
From this west side of the temple, the others spotted an interesting looking side street with shops that they wanted to check out, so we continued in that direction rather than heading back towards Kaminarimon. We end up doing a large loop around several blocks, but partway through we decided to stop for lunch. It was getting close to midday and we needed to be back on a train heading south soon after 13:00 for me to make the resumption of my ISO Standards meeting at 14:00. (The morning was taken off to allow attendees to visit the CP+ camera show in Yokohama, during the VIP and media opening time, before it opened to the general public.)
I searched the area for suitable eating places to satisfy our various food requirements, and found a cafe called Coffee Kan not far away. It did simple sandwiches and pancakes and some rice and pasta dishes. We got a table straight away and ordered sandwiches, while my wife decided to go out and look around and have the scone she’d brought from our breakfast venue. The sandwiches were pretty good, with nice fresh ingredients and thick fluffy white bread slices.
After eating we met up with my wife outside, who had wandered off to look at some more shops in the area. We walked back to Asakusa Station and boarded a train heading south. On the train I realised that it didn’t seem to stop at Shinagawa, and looking at the line map I realised the subway line branched at Sengakuji, and we were on a train that went the other way. My wife confirmed this with a nice older lady who spoke English, who told us we needed to change trains there. This was only one stop past Mita, where I needed to get off for my ISO meeting, so I suggested we all get off there, and I could check the destination indicators to see what train they needed to get to Shinagawa. I figured it’d probably be the next train behind us. The old lady got off with us and said she was going to Shinagawa too, so she could help my co-travellers to get there. I left them at Mita, exiting the station and walking over to Shibaura for my afternoon of meetings.
This afternoon the first technical session was on image flare characterisation. There was a lot of discussion on determining the appropriate exposure time for taking photos to measure image flare. This is a tricky topic because normal camera exposure is designed for scenes that humans might look at, with more or less even lighting for the most part. But to measure image flare you need to take photos of bright points of light in a dark room, and the camera exposure system freaks out and doesn’t know what to do. So we have to come up with a way of defining what the exposure should be so that you can see and measure the camera flare on the resulting images, without it being overexposed.
The second session was discussing low light performance with hand-held camera shake to evaluate image stabilisation methods. For this one, Dietmar had collated the experiments he’d performed using all of the meeting participants as observers, judging the image quality of various degradations (the one I did on Tuesday). He’d done some preliminary statistics and showed off the numbers. He plans to run many more tests with other observers to build up a solid foundation for determining threshold levels for image acceptable/unacceptable degradation due to low light and image stabilisation.
We finished just before 17:00 and I walked back to our hotel. I walked a different way this time, crossing over the canal to the Shiba side and walking along the main road back to Shinagawa. I detoured off the main road to take a couple of back streets in one area, that looked on the map like it had a lot of shops and restaurants. However it turned out to be mostly residential with only a few restaurants scattered here and there.
After rejoining M. in the hotel room, we arranged to meet T. and K. at 18:00 to go to dinner. We had nothing booked for tonight, with a vague plan to maybe go get some ramen, since ramen places don’t take bookings. I’d done some checking online and found that Ippudo did vegan ramen, and they had a branch in Gotanda, just two stops away on the Yamonote Line, so it was simple to get to. But today at the meeting I double checked the menu and discovered that only certain Ippudo stores had the vegan ramen dishes. The only places in Tokyo were at Shinjuku and Ginza. So we decided to head to Ginza, where the Ippudo was very close to one of the exits from Higashi-Ginza Station.
We arrived and there were two couples ahead of us in the queue for tables, but there were empty seats inside being cleaned up, so we didn’t have long to wait before we were all ushered in. We had a good table for four in the back corner. I ordered the “Akamaru” ramen, which is an Ippudo innovation based on the more traditional “Shiromaru” ramen, which my in-laws opted for when I explained the differences in flavour and richness. My wife decided not to have the vegan ramen after all, and opted for some simple rice with a soft-boiled egg. We also had a serve of gyoza to share as a side. My ramen was really good, and in-laws declared that theirs was really delicious too.
We headed back to our hotel. My mother-in-law turned in for the night while the rest of us went up to the bar at Table 9 Tokyo, the fancy bar/restaurant on the 39th floor of our hotel. It was very funky with ambient dance music and lots of colour-changing lights. The drinks menu was impressive, containing some super expensive whiskies. We had a drink each and stared out at the mesmerising view of Tokyo at night. Our table faced a window looking north to the centre of the city, so it was full of buildings and lights.
After this we headed back down to our rooms for the night.