Ok, I was planning to make this two posts, but exam season starts tomorrow, so who knows when I’ll blog (or conversely, if I procrastinate enough, you may see more posts :p). Anyway, after getting to Aomori, we took a shinkansen all the way down to Tokyo for two things: the NTT History Center of Technologies and ICPC.

The NTT History Center of Technologies is basically a museum about the history of telecommunications in Japan. It’s only two days a week (Thursdays and Fridays), from 1pm to 5pm. I wasn’t sure what quite to expect from this.

So despite the fact we made really last minute reservations, the staff there were really nice and gave us the student tour, which meant we got to watch a video about how NTT envisions the future of telecommunications will be like, and a guided tour by a OB supporter. An OB supporter is basically a worker from NTT who has retired, and thus, has a lot of insider knowledge about how things work.

Starting point

 Since my Japanese is not the best, especially when technical terms are involved, I was pretty worried whether I could understand anything. When it came to the tour, I understood most, but not all of what was going on. When it came to the exhibitions, I was so glad there were English explanations!

 One exhibit we made sure to go to was to see the ADSL donated by COARA, a company deeply involved in Japan’s internet history. The company president had come to give us a talk, and I think my teacher was involved in the donation, so yeah, we made sure to find it.

If you can read Japanese, here’s more information about it.

The next day, we went to ICPC at Musashi University.

Basically, we listened to three panels: One on privacy, one on drones, and one on internet and the culture of cities. For some reason, I found the first speakers of the first two panels to be speaking really fast, and didn’t really catch what they said.

In between panels, someone flew a drone!

The drone was really noisy though, and it seemed hard to control.

So, that’s about it I guess. It felt like a pretty long trip, and we definitely crammed a lot of activities into it. And now, to study!