cat /proc/claus

Today was my first Rinkou class in this semester (Rinkou actually started last week, but I was too sick last friday to attend).

Rinkou was probably one of the only constants since my second coming to Japan. From my two master years all the way to the end of my PhD, every friday morning during class terms we were attending it.

In the Rinkou (which english translation is “seminary”), each student is supposed to present the results of his past 6 months of research to the rest of the department. For master students, that means 3 rounds of rinkou - the first one a “survey”, the two following terms “results”, and the last term they get a reprieve to work on their Thesis. For PhD students, it means 4 rounds of rinkou - two surveys and two results, alternating, with the last year without rinkou for thesis writing.

Every Friday we have three presentations (with parallel rooms in case there are too many students in the department to go through everyone in one term). Each student has 25 minutes to make his presentation, plus 5 minutes for discussion. We are supposed to write a brief report (1 or 2 paragraphs) about each presentation, and turn it in by the end of the class.

The idea has its merits. Supposedly, it increases the exchange of ideas between different laboratories in the same department - so that you can see research topics outside of your immediate field, and you get to get input from people who do not hear about your research everyday. It makes new students get used to preparing presentations, presenting, and answering questions. It also makes students get used to listening to “presentation and question” kinds of sessions. The “one big presentation every six months” may help some students organize their time.

In practice, there are quite a few shortfalls. Very few students really pay attention or make an effort to seriously discuss the works. This is not surprising, for most presenters don’t take the effort to make a presentation that is understandable for people from other fields - this is specially bad in my department, which has laboratories of very radically different fields, like artificial learning and semiconductor research. So the questions come mostly only from the professors, and the comments limit themselves to “thanks for your presentation”. To “remedy” this, the departments have come with a bunch of bad solutions like taking the student number of each student who makes a question, and requesting all students to have made at least one question by the end of each term, defining minimal limits for the size of each written contribution, etc. The more requirements they make, the more the students find a way around those requirements.

It is really a waste. Today, for coincidence, I have talked to two different sets of friends about how would it be possible to improve the rinkou so that we could take more from it. To be honest, our conversations didn’t go very far. In fact, last year there was this big meeting of the PhD students of my department, where one of the big topics of the agenda was improving rinkou. Many people gave some suggestions, but as far as I can see, nothing serious has changed.

The rinkou is actually a pretty big part of most courses’ coursework. In my case, it counts as 60% of all my credits. It seems that every department in engineering in Tokyo University has its own version of the Rinkou - each with a few differences, but most with the same basic characteristics and problems (as far as I can see from talking to friends in other departments). I have no idea if the Medical and Humanities schools also have something similar or not.

Today is the election day in Japan. This particular election is actually a pretty big deal, because for the first time in many years, the opposition party actually has a chance to take the Liberal Democratic Party out of the Japanese Government - the LDP has been in power for almost 55 years now, since the end of American occupation of Japan post World War II.

I am by no means a political analyst, I’m much less informed about Japanese politics and economy than I wish I would be, so I will only mention a few loose facts and observations that have been bugging me.

Hereditary Seats

One of the big problems I hear about japanese politics is that of “Hereditary Seats”. There are a bunch of reasons for the hereditary seats, from very strong support networks that get passed down from one generation of politics to the next, to restrictions to election publicity that makes it difficult for new/budding politicians to get their name out. The results is that some families have been in power for up to three generations now, forming literally a “ruling class” in japanese politics. Fortunately, this seems to be coming around, as some of those “feuds” are suffering defeats around the country.

Young indiference

Another big problem I see in Japanese politics is that a terribly large part of the young population was alienated to it. In a TV program a few years ago, I heard interviews with college-aged Japanese saying that “I’m abstaining from this election because I feel I’m still too young, politics is better left for adults” - as a result, the elderly in Japan (who already compose a pretty high part of Japan’s population) held an even greater weight in the elections, which meant that topics like unemployment and work reform would take second stage in politician discourse over pension reform. (OTOH, one of the reasons that the ruling party is taking such flak is that they screwed up pension reform hard a few years ago). Fortunately, this seems to be beginning to change - this year I have seen a number of advertisements in the trains calling young people to vote.

No Criticism

Somewhat related to the previous point, in Japan, comedians never, ever, make jokes about current political events, or political figures. They may have have done the most bizarre/astounding thing ever (like the defense minister saying that Japan was prepared for an alien invasion, the Finance minister drunken antics, or the Prime minister saying that poor people shouldn’t marry), you’ll never see a comedian on TV harping on these gold mines. I was talking about this with a japanese friend the other day, and she told me this is because comedians fear the negative repercussion to their careers if they make jokes about “powerful people”.

As silly as it may be, I think this is a pretty serious problem actually. It is the politicians that should be afraid of the people and the ability of the media to show the skeletons in their closet and make them public, and not the other way around. This “fear of offending/showing ridicule”, may contribute, in my opinion, on the fact that Japanese Youth is so distant from politics - like the comment I quoted above, they feel politics to be “too serious” for them. Another example, a few years ago I participated in a talk show in Japanese TV, which got together a bunch of Japanese and Foreign 20-somethings to talk about society problems. They told us that the show with the theme “participation of young people in politics” would be canceled because there would be elections 3 months later - do you want any BETTER time to talk about participation in politics on TV?

Treatment of foreigners

Finally, I’m really looking forward for a DPJ led government. The LDP has a very poor record on its relationship with foreigners, with the government refusing to see immigration as necessary or
even beneficial to Japanese society, and taking cheap shots at foreigners every now and then to get some points with the population. The DPJ has a much more interesting position in this - They usually add text about foreign plans and rights in their fliers - which would be weird for a campaign promise, since foreigners have no votes, so I can only imagine that they actually mean it.

Looking forward to the results tomorrow.

This weekend I worked on the International (Asian) edition of the Robocon competition. This event is a robotic competition where 20 teams from 19 countries (Japan, as the host country this year, gets two teams) build robots to complete a certain task. All teams are composed of undergraduate students, who design, build, program and control the robots. The task for this year used three robots, the first two of which needed to carry the third robot through a obstacle course, so that the third robot could play three drums in the goal area (video here).

It was a very fun event. All the competitors were very young, and excited about being overseas (sometimes for their first time) to participate. It reminded me a bit of when I participated on the ICPC programming contest finals. In the Robocon 2009, I worked as a translator and assistant for the Macao team. At first they were a bit disappointed that the organization didn’t find a translator that could speak Cantonese, but eventually we got to get along well. Their team leader knew a lot about Japan, and I tried to encourage him to come for grad school here.

The competition itself was composed of two days. During the first day, the teams got to assemble their robots, do practice runs, and clear their questions with the judging team. The contest itself was on the second day. It was composed of two stages. On the first stage the teams were divided in 7 groups of 3 teams which played against each other. The second stage was championship style, with the first place from each of the 7 groups plus the best second place.

The winner of the contest was the Chinese team. The Chinese had a robot which was clearly superior to the other robots in the contest - it managed to finish the task in 18-19 seconds, while the best robots among the other teams would go for 23-26 seconds. It was a really good piece of engineering, and they really deserved to win, but their matches were a little boring to watch

The second place was the team from Hong Kong - which was a nice surprise. The HK team were the “crazy kids” of the competition - unlike most other teams, they didn’t had an uniform and were often seen around joking. They didn’t do well during their test runs, and even almost broke the goal drum once, which brought a warning from the judges. But they managed to get their game together to fix whatever the problem was in time, and did great times in all their games in the competition. They also the best design prize.

The most disputed game in the day was between Korea and Thailand, in the first stage. In the match, both their robots hit the drum at the same time, and the judges decided to have them try again - but because both robots were based on compressed air, the teams had to rush to the pits to refill the air tanks - it was really tense!

Macao’s team didn’t have much experience - they were 1st and 2nd year students, and never been on a robotic competition before - but in their own way, they did quite well, winning against the Sri Lanka team, and losing against the favorite Toyohashi team. It was interesting to see that the Chinese in the audience would cheer up both the Macao and HK team as well as the team from the mainland - as the the team members put it in his interview to the Japanese TV, “In practice, we are like one country” - some lessons in geopolitics were had.

The competition ended without any serious problems happening (other than the Thais raiding the beer of every table in the farewell party :-D). Tomorrow will be a city tour for the participants, including lunch in the Tokyo Tower, a visit to the Tokyo Science and Technology Museum, and the Gundam in Odaiba. Of course, I’ll tag along to “provide translation” to the kids!

• This week I got from the City Office a notice asking me to renew my Alien Registration Card (Gaijin Tourokusho). The Alien Card is a document which the Japanese Gov. issues for all foreigners living in Japan. Its possession on your person is obligatory at all times, and it is a point of contention which isn’t really the point of this post. Once my mother told me that a sign of the passing of the time was when she had to renew her driver’s license, which are issued for 5 or 10 years in Brazil. When I got the letter for the Office, I felt the same way - the fact that finally came the time for me to renew my Alien card was a small sign of how long I have already been living here. (The renewal process itself is fairly painless - just bring a couple of pictures to print a new card).
• Talking about how long, last week was my birthday. I held two small parties, on saturday and sunday, so I could accomodate more people at my apartment, and both were quite fun. On saturday I made strogonoff, and on sunday I tried to bake a cake, but managed to burn my mixer (the cake still came through). On both days we played plenty of Mario Kart wii, and board games, like Carcassone, Munchkin and Texas Hold’em. Pics Here.
• Saturday, Hugo commented that it would be almost one year already since we started playing 4th Edition. I really didn’t see that time passing by.

Tonight, me and Marilia went to the Rikugien Park, near our apartment. It seems this park is one of the most famous in Tokyo. They are now having a light up event, to highlight the effects of the koyou (reddening of leaves in autumn).

It is quite pretty, specially because, unlike the light ups in kyoto, they do not put up a LOT of light beaming up everywhere. Instead, the lights in Rikugien are used very sparingly, in order to just highlight parts of the trees.

After leaving the park, we went to this very small pizzeria called Elba. The shop is just in the way to our home from the station, and for one year we always passed by it without even stopping. What a waste! The place has a very homey, familiar atmosphere - and the pizza was delicious - completely unlike the weird stuff that goes as pizza here in Tokyo - thin crust, and simple, few, quality toppings. Too bad we got there too late, and the last order time came before we could have desert - they seem to have hand made tiramisu.

On our way back, we passed by a convenience store to buy some ice cream. The cashier was a foreigner (indian-like), and started some small talk with us. This is one thing that I miss in japan - when random people talk to you just because. He was really nice but, embarassingly, I must say that I was taken by surprise by the conversation, and didn’t take the opportunity as I should… Tokyo is making my social skills rusty, I guess