Robots, Beef, and Japanese Jackie Chan

Like many weekends recently, last weekend started with a train out of Kyoto on Friday. This time we were headed for Osaka, joining the economics class, Political Economy of Japan, on a field trip to see a lab that researches robots. The appeal should be obvious. The lab was at Osaka University, which we got something of a tour of before heading to the lab. Getting from where the taxis dropped us off to the room where the lecture was held took us past a variety of interesting buildings, through a bamboo forest, across a pond, and in a circle around the lab building knocking on windows to try to get someone to let us in. We did eventually get in, and from the door we proceeded to a very interesting lecture on the learning strategies that they are using in their research to allow the robots to learn the way that human babies do, from experimentation and interaction with human adults. Unfortunately, said lecture was delivered by a calm man with a quiet voice standing in a dark room, and I'd at that point gotten a total of 5 hours of sleep in the last 24, so I'm a bit fuzzy on the details of how the robots were learning to move effectively and take input from their sensors. Once Professor Asada started talking about the robots learning to speak, though, I was all there. I'll restrain myself from telling all of the technical details, but it's basically a feedback loop, in which the robot makes a sound, the human repeats back the closest approximation they can make of that sound, and the robot records the sound produced. This gives it a notion of what sounds are included in human languages, since human vocal output is trained by the language they grew up with, as well as a mapping from the different sounds it can make to the correspondign human sounds. As the training progresses, the human will (unconsciously, the presentation suggested) move closer and closer to the phonemes of the language that they are effectively trying to teach the robot. By the end of 100 repetitions, they say, the robot can fairly effectively produce the five vowels of Japanese. Also interesting was the vocal apparatus of the robot. It was basically a long, soft tube with a buzzer at the end. The tube was manipulated by motors attached to metal plates that constrict the tube at five points, simulating the changes in shape that humans can produce in our vocal tracts. The lips were also movable, being part of a surface that was stretched and relaxed by binder clips on the four edges. I'll try and get a picture up at some point... would probably be more helpful than that description.

Anyways, from the lecture room we went up to the lab itself, where we got to see the robots they'd been discussing. One was about toddler-sized and covered with soft padding, though they unzipped the sides to show us the sensors under the skin and the metallic innards under that. It's designed to be played with like a human baby, and at this point it's capable of standing with human assistance, sort of like a baby just learning to walk. It makes some vaguely child-like but also vaguely creepy noises, and has all sorts of touch sensors, as well as visual and auditory processing. It can respond to tactile, auditory, and visual cues. In particular, it is programmed to focus on skin-colored patches that appear in front of it. Unfortuantely, our group being much more multi-racial than the research team, it didn't quite recognize all of us as human. It really liked Chris's red shirt, though. Better than skin belonging to any race we had along.

After the robots, we went to an all-you-can-eat dinner of fried stuff on sticks. I don't know if it actually was as unhealthy as it sounds, but it was definitely delicious. I would say which of the fry-able items were my favorites, but they're all vegetables that I can't quite identify in English. At any rate, I now have at least some idea of how to fry things Japanese style. Don't know exactly how that would come in useful, but I suppose it could. If I knew what the sauce and the powder and the oil were.... Oh well. Once we left the restaurant, stuffed and in some cases a little tipsy, we went in almost a full circle around the building before realizing that the people we were following were the ones who had been the brightest red and loudest in the restaurant. After completing the circle to get back to the path that we should have taken, we went to the subway and rode to the hostel where we were staying -- incidentally, the same one that some of us stayed in our first night in Japan. From there, most people went back out to drink more and then either wander or go clubbing, but as soon as I saw the bed I knew I wasn't going to get back out that night. I was woken up briefly when everyone else got in just after midnight, but basically slept through until 10 the next morning, at which point I was almost caught up on the sleep I'd missed earlier in the week.

In the morning, we grabbed brunch at a convenience store. Instead of the usual bread, which we tend to ignore the unspoken rules and eat while walking, we got noodle soups, which even we wanted to sit down for. Our choice of seats, though, was apparently unorthodox. We sat on some milk crates outside the convenience store and had people staring at us the whole time. The first few times, it was funny. One businessman was very irritated. Homelesss people and a guy passing on a bike were puzzled. A couple of them came up and started trying to talk to us, but assuming that we didn't know any Japanese, so it basically turned into him and us alternating making funny expressions and laughing. Hard to be sure how much of the difference was our behavior and how much was the relative outgoingness of Osaka residents as compared to Kyoto residents, but at any rate it was entertaining. Once we'd finished, we headed to the train station and spent about half an hour on our way to Kobe.

As the train passed through Kobe, there were a couple of stops that looked major and city-like, but that we didn't get off at because we were going to the one called Kobe. Kobe station, it turns out, is closer to the port and farther from the commercial and tourist centers, so we had to go back eventually, but in the meantime we got to explore Harborland, which had a small roller coaster and walking/rolling animals to ride on, a building with all sorts of fun-looking activities that we figured we probably couldn't get away with joining since all the people in the pictures were small Japanese children, and a shrine. We also spent a while wandering the backstreets near Kobe station looking for a hotel, but finding that every place we entered either had rooms by the hour or was already full. After about 5 exciting rounds of "Are you a love hotel?" and three times entering hotels and finding them to be full, we decided to get back on the train to Sannomiya, where an informational map told us that the actual tourist center of the city was. From Sannomiya, we were able to find a business hotel right off. It was a bit expensive, but the rooms were really nice, big, traditional Japanese-style rooms. We got our rooms, put down our bags, and after about an hour and a half break watching the last couple episodes of Firefly, we headed out into the city for dinner.

Like most of the cities I've explored here, Kobe's center has arcaded streets full of restaurants, stores, and pachinko parlors. The main difference, from what I've heard and what I've seen, is that Kobe has a lot of international influence. Presumably it was one of the ports opened to the Europeans during the Edo period, but whatever the reason, there are a lot more international restaurants there than elsewhere. The Italian in particular looked delicious, and there were lots of international bars, but we'd set out from the hotel intending to have Indian food, so we kept looking until we found it. After a brief confusion, based on having entered the wrong building and finding a VIP club (strip club) where we wanted there to be a restaurant, we found the place. I think we frustrated the waiter a bit with the amount of time it took us to decide on our orders, since everything looked so tasty. We did eventually decide, though, and the garlic naan was worth the wait. I love Japanese food, but one thing it doesn't have nearly enough of is garlic. The garlic naan had huge chunks of garlic sitting on top of it, and I enjoyed every bite. The chicken tica was also a nice change, being much more the kind of spicy that I'm used to in curries, as opposed to the delicious but new type of spicy used in Japanese curries. The dishes were expensive and small, though, so after dinner we started wandering again, vaguely in search of cheaper and more filling food.

As we were walking down one little street, I sort of noticed a sign for a corokke shop (corokke are sort of like fried mashed potatoes? but tastier than that sounds). I didn't think too hard about it, and didn't mention it, figuring we'd see something else as we kept walking. The shop was an open one on the street, though, and the owner called out to us as we walked past. Maybe 50 feet down the street we decided to go back and get some corokke. Good decision. The owner, who introduced himself as Japanese Jackie Chan (insert fancy-looking moves here) was eager to talk to us and to make his other customers talk to us. He had some regulars and some new customers, but everyone was treated the same and required to sit at the same table and introduce ourselves. When we first got there, there was just a Korean guy who shortened his name to Tomi so we could pronounce it. Then came a regular, who was introduced as NEC-san and apparently works for NEC in Kobe. NEC-san told us a bit more about the shop, including how Yanpapa gets drunk every night and enjoys talking to the gaijin who like the openness of his shop and often stop in. Yanpapa started having us serve drinks to his customers, with the help of Mari-san, the woman who was mostly doing that job. Later, he taught Melilnda and Harrison to cook corokke. Apparently, you take them out of the oil when they're fox-colored. Or maybe tofu-colored. It's the same word. NEC-san bought us a round of drinks, Yanpapa recommended the plum sake, and a good time was had by all. As the stereotype goes, Japanese people are way more fun when they've been drinking. Or maybe just in Kobe. Like the funny face makers in Osaka, hard to be sure. At any rate, if I do make it back to Kobe, which I probably will, I'll be giving Yanpapa another visit.

It was getting late and our hotel had a midnight curfew, so we said our goodbyes to Yanpapa, NEC-san, and Giggolo-san (A first time customer who showed up later and was immediately told that his clothes made him look like a giggolo. He objected until the conversation had turned a bit and Melinda supplied the word "pimp." That he didn't mind so much, but Yanpapa stuck with Giggolo-san). I had fireworks and a lighter in my pockets, and we needed to find someplace to light them that wouldn't burn down the city. We started walking towards the ocean, but since we weren't going to make it there in time to get back, we picked an empty parking lot and started lighting off the little spinning rings. I've never seen the same sort of thing in the US... they spark for a few seconds while you run away, then start spinning really fast, occasionally jump in the air, and finally go BOOM and disappear. That went well for the first several, but when we had about 5 left someone in a nearby apartment building started shining a flashlight at us, so we decided to drop the rest and split. Fast-ish. Fireworks are illegal in most Japanese cities during the day, and probably more so when it's almost midnight. At any rate, we got back to the hotel a few minutes before curfew, watched My Neighbor Totoro in Japanese, since we couldn't figure out how to turn on the subtitles, and then went to bed.

The next morning, we overslept as usual. First on the agenda, which we had actually set in advance for once, was a sake brewing museum in eastern Kobe. It was pretty interesting. I don't know much about how beer or wine are made, but there seemed to be more steps than I'd heard of in those. Don't know for sure that there isn't a separate mold-growing step, but I don't remember hearing about it. There were also incredibly life-like mannequins in the displays that sort of freaked us out as we were entering and videos showing both how the sake was brewed in the past and how it's done now in the adjoining factory. At the end of the route, sake samples were provided. Unfortunately, this part was made rather less fun as Melinda realized she had lost her wallet somewhere between Sannomiya station and the museum. On the plus side, Japan is quite possibly the best place to lose a wallet. The museum staff immediately scattered throughout the museum to conduct a thorough search and had her fill out a lost item form when they didn't find it. The station staff did similarly, and a couple days later the wallet turned up at Osaka station with all the money still in it.

Anyways, after the sake museum, we went by train to Shinkobe, where we had a slightly expensive but very worthwhile lunch of the famous Kobe beef. The dinners start at $70, but lunches are significantly less. The beef itself was accompanied by six types of grilled vegetable (the number, but not the nature, was advertised on the menu), soup, rice, and tea. Big meal, but very tasty. Again had garlic, which again made me very happy. From there, we went to explore the giant hotel that we had eaten underneath. It's a 37-story building, but the top few floors are off-limits, so we went as high as we could to the hotel cafe, around the 35th floor if I recall. The prices there were way too high, but we managed to make the staff think that we were going to order for long enough that we could get a good look at the view. We then went to a somewhat lower floor, I think 11, and found an unlocked conference room through which we could get out onto a balcony and still get a pretty good view over the city. We saw a shrine-looking place with a fountain and headed down to investigate. Turned out to be a barbeque pit decorated to look like a shrine -- hence the different colors -- but the fountain was real enough. We played a little longer, then headed back to Sannomiya, picked up our bags, and left for Kyoto in time to be home for dinner. Good weekend, and Kobe definitely lives up to its reputation as a great weekend-trip city.