Our destination today is Nara, the old capital of Japan. We are going to visit Sharp Corporation and take in the sights. I have ensured that our weather will be good because I’ve brought my jacket and other unnecessary crap.

The train drive from Kyoto to Nara is about 45 minutes, so I decided to do a bit of wardriving (warriding, wartraining?). From the train using Net Stumbler, I was able to detect 9 wireless hot spots, over half of them were unsecured. Unfortunately, we went by so fast I didn’t have time to connect.

I think part of the reason I couldn’t make it connect comes from my crappy NetGear WG511 card (Google, please archive this extremely negative review for the entire world to read, thank you very much). It has got this piece of crap software that’s on its third or fourth revision that goes along with it, and it has a real hard time connecting to unsecured networks. I have yet to make the software that came with this card connect to any encrypted network. You put the settings in, and nothing happens. To make it connect to an encrypted network, you have to go to the Windows network settings, tell it to let Windows manage the networks, and then input all the WEP settings there, even though the documentation specifically says don’t do this. It’s really an awful card. If you’re reading this NetGear, you owe me a decent card.

Now that that’s out of my system, back to Nara. We stopped for lunch and an impromptu Japanese language course from E-chan, one of Dr. Stapp’s Japanese friends. I learned how to order something, you say the name of the thing you want and then “onegashimasu.” Today was subuta, a sweet and sour pork which was good but the pork had a strange aftertaste that I couldn’t identify. Afterwards, I learned how to say it was delicious-“oshii desu.”

Nara was beautiful today. The sky was clear, and you could see the hills that surround Nara. They are quite different than the Ozark Mountains that I’m used to. They are much steeper and are not as smooth.

On the way to Sharp Corporation, Tim struck up a conversation with a college kid who was going for an interview with Sharp. He was very nervous, but we tried to help him as best we could. We peppered him with some sample questions and made sure his tie was tied correctly and his collar was turned down. Good luck guy!

Everybody here wears a black suit and white shirt for work. The only difference is the tie and what color the stripes on it are.

Sharp was a pretty neat place. We were shown their hall of history by our tour guide Nigata-san. The company was founded by Tokuji Hayakawa in 1925. On display were a lot of the old products that they had produced at one time. Among the things they have produced:

1915-Mechanical pencils
1920-Crystal radios (from reversed engineered foreign radios)
1940-B&W TVs
1958-Air conditioners, portable radios, home appliances
1960-Color TV
1962-Restaurant microwave ovens
1964-Electric calculators,
1980-Stereos, VCRs, Boom boxes
1981-Japanese-English translator
1987-PDAs
1990’s- pioneered cameras in phones, provided solar cells for Japan space program

We got to see a lot of their latest stuff, too, including:

60″ LCD displays in their halls
802.11b wireless TV that is good for up to 30m. I didn’t think that the b network had enough bandwidth to do that.
2 Mega pixel phone cam
360 deg surveillance motion activated camera
Zaurus PDA running Linux. Woo woo!

We were also shown how LCDs work. We saw a little informational video, but the coolest part was the little bottle of the liquid crystal they passed around. It looks a lot like milk, but it felt heavier.

Finally, we got to see one of their future products: light, thin, low power consumption transistors made of mother’s glass, 3000 times smoother than regular glass. Yeah, it didn’t make much sense to me either.

If you’ll take a look at some of the pictures in the gallery, you can see some of the Sharp dorms that are located on the Sharp Corporation campus. They encourage their employees to live right next to where they work and have other built in amenities like an on campus shrine. If you’ll take a close look at the dorms you’ll also see several cracks in them. Those are the results of earthquakes.

Our hotel in Nara was great. It was a traditional hotel that did not allow shoes in the building and required you to change to slippers at the door. They also required you to change into special bathroom slippers when you went in there. They really like it clean.

Before dinner we previewed some of the sights we’re going to see tomorrow, a pond that was featured prominently in romantic literature when the emperor ruled here and a large pagoda dominating the Nara skyline. It was dramatically lit up but none of my photos were very good. Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll get better ones.

We finished the day with yakitori. I never got an exact translation, but I guess it’s a lot like a cross between Spanish tapas (appetizers) and an all you can eat steak place. You have to sit cross-legged at a low table, and naturally, we were seated next to a group that was smoking.

For added excitement, we watched a group of about 25 college kids get drunk and begin to pass out at the table behind us. We called the hogs in response. I think it encouraged them; a couple of them came over and danced some Michael Jackson dances. Remember, people like these are the reason that he can get off.

After yakitori, we wandered around for a while until midnight or so. There were still a lot of people in business suits with briefcases, presumably who had just gotten off work. It was kind of sad.

Tomorrow, Nara up close.