Hey everyone! How did your first day of June go? Can you believe half the year is over? I hope you do, because I can’t. Anyway, I spent the first of June in Kyoto. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there for leisure. (Also, I’ve realised that apart from that one time for the kimono show, every time I go to Kansai, I’ve gone to do job/school related stuff. How… boring of me).

This time, I was in Kyoto for the Smart City Expo. It’s actually from the 1st to the 3rd, but I have classes today and tomorrow, so I decided to just go for the first day’s event.

The Expo was held at the International Centre, which looked like this:

Kinda drab, if you ask me. But the surrounding view more than made up for it. It’s surrounded by mountains!!

Anyway, I went there for the keynote sessions and two afternoon panel sessions. I was hoping to find something about Smart Energy, and while I did get a bit of it, most of it was more for smart city. I must say, Copenhagen seems to really be at the forefront of all this. I got lots of interesting ideas from the keynote speech about it.

I did, however, experience intense confusion when the professor from China repeated referred to China as having “democracy” and moving towards “real democracy”. Or rather, I’m not sure if she was saying that China already had “real democracy”. Depending on her slides, this seemed to change. I’m guessing (hoping) though, that she meant “citizen participation”. Either that, or when she said that democracy meant “rule of the people”, she didn’t include the “by the people” statement. I might have missed something because I was in shock.

Oh, and one thing I really liked was how international the conference was. About half the talks I attended were in English, and the other half was in Japanese. I do wish someone from Singapore was there though, since we do have the Smart Nation Project, and it’d be interesting to see how we’re measuring up.

That’s all I have to report about the contents. The last thing I want to do is to share a picture of the garden, because it is beautiful.

And that was all. I also had a pretty good dinner after that, but that’s for the next post. I just remembered that I haven’t finished my slides for the presentation tomorrow.