4 June 2009

I was up until 5am this morning, but luckily we didn’t have to meet with Don until 12:35pm in order to catch the 12:50pm Tokyu Train to Yokohama. I slept-in until 10am, which was a nice change from getting up early every day. We got into Yokohama around 2pm, and our first office visit was Koizumi Masao’s. Koizumi additionally teaches Master-level architecture courses at a local university, so he had four of his students there to tag along with us. Koizumi gave us a 30 minute presentation on some of his recent works, then he took us to two more firms. Koizumi was nice enough to plan our entire day in Yokohama for us, so we were really lucky to have such a prominent and well-known tour guide. The second office we visited was less than a block away, and it was the office of Mikan Gumi. Mikan is actually French, but he worked in Japan for 15 years. He didn’t have a presentation prepared, so we just walked around the office, and he talked about some of the large models they had constructed. Lastly, we visited Riken Yamamoto’s office. We were three for three on office that had English speakers, so it was nice that we didn’t have to listen to Don translating all the time. At Riken’s office, we were surprised to find out that they sometimes work 100 hours in a week with no days off. That is completely inconceivable, especially when compared to the American work ethic! Wow! It was really interesting to see how differently other countries perform work and to what standard they must meet.
After visiting Riken’s offfce, Mikan and Koizumi continued to lead us around. We visited the Osanbashi Yokohama International Passenger Terminal by Foreign Office Architects. It was my fourth time visiting the port since arriving in Japan, and I’m glad the weather was a little less hazy than usual. We then proceeded to walk around the New Port Opening, since the Zou-no-Hana Port Project was done by Koizumi himself. It was really neat to visit a prominent project with the architect who designed it. What a great opportunity! Finally, we made our way to the area showcasing Yokohama’s 150th Anniversary of the Port Opening. There were multiple exhibitions scattered throughout the area, but we specifically wanted to enter the Nissan Y+150 Forest of Beginners Exhibit since Mikan Gumi was the architect of the structure. He even brought along a few drawing sheets for each of us showing the plan and elevations of the temporary structure. We entered the exhibit after 6pm because the price is cut in half to 1,200 yen. I still can’t believe that it usually costs 2,400 yen to get in! There wasn’t even very much to look at once inside, but the main feature of this particular exhibit was the French “La Machine” mechanical spider. It was approximately 12m tall, and it required about eight people to operate it at any given time. We had to wait about 30 minutes to see the last demonstration, but it was totally worth it. It was almost scary to think that someone could create such a large and operable creature, and I felt like I was in a movie.
After the spider demonstration, we left the exhibit and said goodbye to Mikan. Koizumi had made reservations for us at a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, so we started walking back to the Chinatown area. The Chinese restaurant was really small, and our large group filled up the entire thing. Koizumi had already ordered certain dishes for us, so in total, we had about eight plates of different foods come out. The meal was really good, and I was completely full. I’m glad the Cal Poly program paid for it because it turned out to be about 3,500 yen per person! By the time we finished up with dinner, it was already after 10pm. What a long day, and our final project was still due tomorrow! We thanked Koizumi and his students heavily and said our goodbyes. The train ride back to Tokyo went by fairly quickly, and we began working immediately after getting back to the NOMYC. I was pretty much done with my portion of the project, but I still stayed up all night helping everyone else in my group finish up their stuff. It was a really long night.