I was in Yokohama for a week in January, attending a conference at the Pacifico Convention Center and visiting prospective and existing customers of my company.


Tuesday

After arriving at Narita and picking up my bags, including one large cardboard box that I sent from Narita to Satomi's family in Kagoshima, I took the Narita Express train to Yokohama Station, then transferred to the Yokohama line for the short ride to Kannai Station and Bashamichi Street, where the Roynet Hotel is located. The Roynet is a non-descript business hotel with small rooms, no view but reasonable prices and free internet. A good shower, a firm bed and plenty of bandwidth, what else does one need?

When I checked in at the front desk I was given a message from Katsumi. I went up to my room, changed into a clean shirt, washed my face (mostly in an attempt to wake myself up) and called him on his mobile phone. Katsumi suggested we meet near Kannai Station for dinner. I found him at the station, and he led me across the street to a small restaurant where Dan Notestein (founder of SynaptiCAD and someone I've known for about eleven years now) was waiting, wearing a dark suit with a rather bright yellow tie, fresh from a customer meeting.

The restaurant that Katsumi had chosen had a no-shoes, tatami-floored section, so I slipped off my shoes and put them into one of the small wooden lockers. My shoes were so large (size 12) that the door on the front wouldn't close.

The three of us ate far too much food (Katsumi kept ordering more) and drank perhaps a little too much sake. I was sleep-deprived and a little drunk at the same time when I got back to my hotel room and collapsed into bed.

Wednesday

On Wednesday I woke early due to jet lag, and was out of bed before 4:00AM. I had time to catch up on emails (dozens of them, it seemed) and go out for a walk in the morning, before the sun came up. The air was cold, not much above freezing, and there were scraps of snow left from a storm the previous week. The sky was clear, and as the sun came up the buildings and signs glowed and the people started appearing, looking ready for work as they hurried along the sidewalks.

I needed a non-grounded plug adapter for my notebook computer and found one of those at a Lawson's 24-hour mini-mart around the corner from the hotel. There is a Tully's next to the hotel (and a Starbuck's across the street) so I stopped in there for a cup of coffee before going up to my room to change into my suit and tie for the day.

I had agreed the previous night to meet Katsumi at Kannai Station, at the north entrance. I found him there, and together we rode the crowded train to the Kawasaki area for a meeting with a customer at a well-known Japanese camera/copier company. There was a Shinto shrine on our way, and Katsumi took a detour to drop in a few coins and say a prayer for luck. (This is the role of Shinto to the average Japanese citizen; its many gods are supposed to bring good fortune for family, business and health. Buddhism is assigned the task of taking care of the dead, of one's ancestors. No point in asking for a big purchase order at the temple nearby, because the Buddhists aren't concerned with that sort of thing.)

We spent about 90 minutes at the customer site, listened to their requirements and presented a product status. We then returned on the train to Yokohama and walked from Sakuragicho Station to the convention center, where the Electronic Design Solutions Fair was being set up. This show is the Japan equivalent of the Design Automation Conference. Our company has a booth in the Venture Pavalion, which is a special area partly funded by a US based industry consortium. There were around 15 companies (mostly small startups, all non-Japanese) setting up their exhibits in this area, and the conference had scheduled various events specifically intented to help small companies get into the Japan market.

On Wednesday evening there was a reception for participants in the Venture event that started with a talk by John Goodsell, former head of the Cadence Japan office and now head of the CoWare Japan office. His talk was interesting, funny... useful for small companies trying to sell in Japan.

Later at that same reception (which was solely intended to connect foreign startup companies with potential reps and with potential large customers like Sony, Toshiba, etc) I fell into conversation with two engineering directors from Sharp. One of them was also a professor at a large university, and both of them were involved with an internal tool at Sharp that sounds very much like our own product. This tool will never be commercialized, but it's an example of how much these large companies depend on their own internal tools. Nonetheless Katsumi said later that this group at Sharp will buy a license of our software, perhaps to evaluate against their own tools.

I was tired, and after having dinner with Katsumi and Dan I headed back to the hotel and got to sleep early.

Walking tour of the red light district, Yokohama (just window shopping)

Thursday

Thursday was a very long day. Working a trade show booth is hard, and for me it's a sure way to blow out my back as well as my feet. I was standing in not-very-comfortable shoes on a concrete floor, doing demonstrations and wearing out my voice trying to compete with speaking events being held on a large stage right across the aisle. There were two Germans from a small Munich-based company adjacent to our booth, and during the lulls in demos we would critique the archaic "booth bunnies" (known here as trade show "companion girls") used by many of the larger companies to attract visitors. These young girls were usually dressed in spiky heeled boots and short-short skirts, and offered sales brochures and giveaway doo-dads while flashing empty-headed, come-hither smiles.

I had visits from a number of people I knew from the states, including a few people I had worked with in the distant past. I was also visited by a couple of snooping competitors. Late in the day I was visited by a VP of sales from one such competitor, who happened to be the guy who was blabbing on his cell phone just before my Embedded Systems Conference workshop last year and was thrown out by the show people for trying to crash an attendee-only event. I asked him, "Weren't you at ESC in California last year?"

"No, I didn't go to that show."

Uh-huh. This guy was not someone easily mistaken for someone else. He was heavy-set, had the same beige suit and the same middle-eastern accent. He asked for a demo. "No problem," I said, "we like to keep the competition informed."

"Oh, we're not competitors, we're in the verification business."

Uh-huh. I proceeded to give him a killer demo, just pulling out all the stops. I was coy about staffing, said we have development in Seattle, Vermont, Kirkland and Russia (all true... he didn't need to know how many in each location). After the demo I told him our pricing and I told him I thought that "ESL" (Electronic System Level Design), which is the category his company's tools are lumped into, was the wrong approach, that it was absurd to charge $50,000 for what was really nothing more than a software compiler. He laughed, and left soon after.

By the time the the show closed for the day I was barely able to walk. But there was another reception party that Katsumi thought we should attend. There were about 100 people milling around, drinking whiskey, wine and beer, and eating banquet food. I recognized executives and/or founders of Synopsys, Cadence and other companes there. There was too much tastefully gray hair and too many expensive suits for my tastes. Dan Notestein (SynaptiCAD founder) and I fell into an extended, one-way conversion with the ex-pat British head of our primary competitor's Japan office. He was quite drunk and shared nothing other than his opinions about American politics, Japanese bar girls, opportunities in asian real estate, Japanese and British tax laws ("Forget about China, Japan is the biggest communist country around here..."), and how difficult it is to sell anything in Japan due to the long evaluation cycles. Well yes, I thought, if our software was as expensive and hard to use as yours... but he actually had a good point there, and we face the same problem.

Saturday

First to catch-up on the conference news from Friday: there were more visits to the booth from good customer prospects. I recall doing demos to NTT, NEC, Ricoh and lots of others. By the end of the day my voice was mostly gone, and my back was a mess.

Katsumi, Dan and I went to dinner after the show, and Katsumi told me that he expects more orders before the end of the next week. Dan's sales in Japan are also up, so it would seem that the suddenly roaring Japanese economy is having an impact.

On Saturday I mostly relaxed in the morning, took a walk with Dan before his flight home, worked on some past-due projects, then decided to head up to Tokyo for some sightseeing. I had my train pass, making it easy and cheap to wave my way into almost any Japan Rail train.
 

I took the Minato Mirai line to Yokohama station (not JR, so I paid a couple of dollars for that ride), then transferred to the Tokaido line, which took me to Tokyo Station. When I got there I realized I was hungry, and also also decided that there was actually nothing in Tokyo that I really wanted to see again. I looked at the big board where the Shinkansen schedules were posted and noticed the train to Nagano, site of the Winter Olympics in 1998, left every 30 minutes. I'd never been there, so I reserved a ticket (again, no charge because of the train pass), bought some snacks at a kiosk and went for a 90-minute ride. The afternoon light at the large Zenkoji temple was pretty, and I took piles of photos (see this page).

The weather was cold in Nagano and I hadn't really dressed for it (just a cotton sweater and leather jacket) so when the sun went down I escaped into a coffee shop / bakery to warm up before walking the half-mile or so back to the train station.

After returning to Yokohama, I exchanged email with the two Germans (Andreas and Volker) from the conference, and we agreed to meet at their hotel and go out for dinner. It was the night before the Chinese New Year, so we walked a few blocks from their hotel into Chinatown, had dinner at a small restaurant, then found the large Chinese Buddhist temple. Incense was burning in large bundles, red lanterns were hanging, and it was quite festive. (In Japanese culture, the New Year is celebrated at Shinto shrines, not at Buddhist temples. In Chinese culture, the temple is the center of action.)

Chinatown, Yokohama

 

Sunday

As I write this, I'm sitting on the Hikari Shinkansen bullet train somewhere southwest of Nagoya, enroute to Yokohama. I have a can of Sapporo beer, a bento box ("ekiben") dinner and a pair of headphones playing Bob Dylan while I tap-tap-tap on the keys of the notebook computer perched on my lap. I'm thinking this is a nice way to travel.

I'm on a "Series 300" train, which is one of the older models but still screaming fast, topping out at around 300KPH. It's 7:34PM and I have at least two hours to ride before getting back to Shin-Yokohama, where I'll transfer to a subway for the return to the hotel. It's Sunday, and although the weekend was supposed to be for relaxing I'm rather worn out.

Today I got up extra-early and traveled (for something like four hours each way, as it turned out, via subway, bullet train, local train and taxi) to Nara. I took a side-trip to the large temple in downtown Kyoto, to stretch my legs and take some pictures. The train station at Kyoto was impressive, and had been dramatically enlarged since my last visit, with a ten or twelve story department store and mall looming over the station entrance.

When I finally arrived at Nara Technical University, Will Rieken (my contact there) and an assistant were just finishing mounting three different video cameras, using gaffer's tape and tripod parts, to a bike rack on the back of an old suzuki sedan. The car was full of electronic junk and the cameras were linked/multiplexed to Will's laptop, which was in the passenger seat. They were going out for a test drive to gather real-time data, but some hardware glitch got in the way and we went inside instead to tour the lab.

We are one of around 20 corporate sponsors of Will's project, and his department has some cool hardware, including a large SGI system (three six-foot tall racks), a room-size, 360-degree virtual reality "cave", multiple human-size robots, and piles of uber-geek hardware. Will is in his late forties, is post-doctorate and has been working at some of the best research labs in Japan for almost 20 years. (He's also been married to four different Japanese women and sired a child by a fifth, but those facts are only entertaining, not particularly relevant... "My personal life is complicated", he told me at some point.)

Will was asked by the head of his department to do something "really out there", so he's developing a remotely-piloted, 2-meter wingspan aircraft for disaster management. He said he decided to do this project after experiencing the Kobe earthquake, when he was inside a large concrete building and saw the walls "turn to plastic" as they shook. Two students he knew well were killed in their homes. The bigger intent of the project is to build a prototype platform for many different image processing components. For those components developed using Impulse C (or any other sponsor products), component licensees will be required by contract to purchase/use the sponsor products, and the university will get the license revenue to fund the continued project. Good for us, good for them.

The parts that FPGAs (and Impulse) are playing are in the image processing. The aircraft will be equipped with an array of high-res cameras, including fish-eye lenses, an omni-view (360 degree) lens and narrow-focus high-res lenses. The idea is that disaster planners meeting in the VR cave will have a complete 360 degree image and can direct the pilot to areas of interest. The image processing software will merge the image data from all the lenses to create a calibrated image with targetable areas of extreme resolution. The aircraft design is finished, but unfortunately there was a "mistake" in the carbon-fiber layup and the whole thing came apart before ever flying.

After visiting Will, I rode a bus with him back to the station, learned more about his personal history and heard his opinions about America "from the outside", which were pretty much in line with my own.

From there, I took a local train a few stops up the line, to the center of Nara and walking distance to Nara Park. I had about two hours before the sun went down, and the afternoon lighting was nice:

Nara Park

Monday and Tuesday

Monday and Tuesday went by in a blur of meetings, held between long rides on trains and on subways from place to place. Japan is an easy place to get around in, but you do have to be prepared for lots of walking, and climbing of stairs, and jostling in the crowded train cars during rush hour. (There are two reasons that Japanese people, and Europeans for that matter, are so much more slender than Americans. One is all that walking, and the other is the vastly better diet, at least as long as they stay away from the American fast food restaurants that are found on nearly every city block.)

The most enjoyable meeting was with a marketing and technical group at Tokyo Electron Devices, a large company that is distributing a low-cost version of our product. One of their engineers demonstrated a project he had done with our software that resulted in dramatic (591X) performance increase of an image conversion algorithm. Exciting stuff, and fodder for some future article.

After the meetings on Monday, Katsumi took me out to dinner at a casual sushi place near his old office in Kannai. We drank far too much sake and ate far too much fish, tempura and shira-ko (fugu sperm). The latter is considered a delicacy but for me it's a "food challenge". I wind up having it offered to me at least once on every trip. The shira-ko was cooked this time in a most unappealing manner, looking far too natural in its squishy, jiggly whiteness, and requiring more sake than usual to wash it down.

When we finished I staggered back to the hotel and collapsed into bed. On Tuesday I felt fine, no hangover at all. I woke early, at around 4:00, and had time for a nice long walk before checking out of the hotel. Katsumi and I had two meetings in Tokyo in the morning, then I headed to Narita Airport on the Narita Express, ending my busy week in Japan.