April 23, 2008

Tokyo (JAPAN)

A Speech by Shota Hattori, the CEO of KKE, and Touring a Fujikura Facility in Sakura

Sadly, my return to Japan and subsequent obligations have effectively ruled out all possibility of keeping up with international soccer. For the first time in a long while, I willingly passed up on the chance to watch a quarter-final match between Chelsea and Liverpool, preferring instead to log a few extra hours of sleep. That's not to imply that sleeping-in was a possibility - five or six hours has become the norm - and typically enough my internal alarm clock went off at 6:03 am. Sadly, there is no going back from there. I joined Kumagai-san for a cup of coffee and early morning chat over the upcoming activities for Golden Week, a period of holidays and travel in Japan. Between soccer matches for school, a trip to the beach house, and a possible Kobe excursion, there is little chance of life slowing down any time in the near future; I am the last to complain.

By 7:15 am I was heading out the door and joining the throngs of salarymen heading to the office for an early start (most people arrive at work at the more modest hour of 9:00 am). As I am living in a very developed and urban part of Tokyo, I am often the only one at the station not wearing a business suit (prisoner's attire) but rather than feeling out of place I feel like the only one with the basic freedom to dress in a comfortable fashion (jeans, polo shirt, and trainers).

It was a 20 minute ride from Osaki station to Oookayama station, where Tokyo Tech is located, and by 8:00 am I had changed into a pair of slippers at the my laboratory. (On a side note, I have grown to like the idea of wearing slippers when inside as it adds to a sense of cleanliness.) Since today was the weekly lab cleaning day, I came to the laboratory early to do my share, which amounts to vacuuming the conference room and wiping down the window panes, electronic equipment, and conference table with a cloth. It is a fairly pain-free procedure, and everything is usually spotless in advance anyway, but everyone does their part in Japan.

Afterward, I hurried across campus to finish up my Japanese homework before class started at 9am. I am currently enrolled in the advanced course for beginners, but I will be taking the final exam for the course next week to try testing into the intermediate advanced course. I have several friends who recently completed the second course, and they swear it is as thorough as Georgia Tech's most advanced course, so hopefully I will leave the country in August speaking adequate Japanese. (In fact, I will see to it that this happens.)

When class finished at 10:35, I had a five minute sprint next door so I could grab a front-row seat at a speech being delivered by Shota Hattori, the CEO of Kozo Keikaku Engineering Inc. (KKE). Born in 1951, Hattori-san attended Japan's premier Tokyo University before being awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to do his graduate studies at MIT in Boston, Massachusetts. However, as he was finishing up his doctoral thesis, his father passed away, and Hattori-san lost a game of rock-paper-scissors with his brother (now a successful lawyer), meaning that it was his responsibility to take over the company. (As should be obvious, this highly successful CEO was not the overbearing or showboating type!.)

Anyway, after working for Boston Consulting for several years, a time in which he complained about being paid extravagantly but hating the minimalist contributions ("playing politics rather than producing an end product"), he focused on turning the company into the mid-size success story it is today. I was obviously fascinated by the man, and after he happily engaged my questions in a Q&A period, I spent some time chatting with him. Strangely enough, he knows my home stay mother's husband, Kumagai-san, and had only the most respectful and inspiring things to say about him.

When I finally dragged myself away from the lecture hall, it was nearing on the wrong side of 12:00 given that I had a 12:30 bus departure for a Fujikura facility in Sakura (1.5 hours away from Tokyo by car). I bought a few rice balls (ONIGIRI, shown to the right) with Singaporean and Japanese friends, but could only finish my salmon one before tucking the others away and running for the bus.

I sat next to Neil, an American friend, who returned to Japan yesterday after a 5 day trip to California for his sister's traditional Indian wedding. Nearly the entire ride was spent trying to understand the process of an Gujurati wedding, which is a three day lesson in patience, but I happily munched away on the pack of Sour Patch Kids he brought back for me.

Fujikura specializes in fiber optic systems and other electrical components, and the tour of their largest Japanese facility was, without wishing to sound overly cliché, a tremendous learning experience. To cut a long story short, optical fibers are what enable me to publish this website from Japan, and yet, until today the extent of my optical fiber knowledge was that data transmission was transformed from electrical signals to light signals using the murky complexities of Linear Algebra (oh! the miseries of Fourier Transfers!) - a fairly simplistic background for an engineering student. The four hours spent listening to company background, and more importantly chatting face-to-face with the R&D and plant engineers who make the company tick, allowed me to ask dozens of questions and fill in all the gaps in my understanding. While the technological details are still two doctoral degrees away from my understanding, today was a marked improvement in one of modern society's important tools.