These are the first versions of the edited videos, I still didn’t have time to add English subtitles, but I wanted to upload them as soon as possible so the Japanese community could check them out first. I will try to add the subtitles in the following days (help would be appreciated). The Matz interview in particular has the worst audio as we were in the middle of an after-party in a small bar with very bad acoustics, so I apologize for its quality, I hope you can get the most out of it.

Alencar Koga helped me out a lot during the interviews. Coincidentally he is a Brazilian just like me, but he’s been living in Japan for a long time and was able to build a great career, being now the CTO of MTI Japan, one of the largest mobile app developers in the country. Akira Matsuda also helped me a lot, and he is also a very well known Rubyist in Japan. Both were edited out of the videos to make them shorter to watch. I appreciate their help a lot as they will be very useful when I do the English subtitles.

The first three videos were recorded at the after-party on the first day of Ruby Kaigi. I have to admit that I was not in my best shape after having a few drinks and after a full day of event :-) By the way, the second and third video interviews were introduced by me in Brazilian Portuguese instead of English, so forgive me for my confusion. All of them have myself asking questions in English and the guests replying back in Japanese. Only the Matz interview is all in English.

Shintaro Kakutani-san was the first one I’ve interviewed, and is one of the main organizers of the event and a long time Ruby evangelist in Japan. He is a very active community leader, helping maintain the Japanese Ruby ecosystem.

The second one was Gotou Yuzou-san, he is one of the oldest Ruby Core Committers and the author of both Webrick and OpenSSL. He wrote a few books about Ruby in Japan and he works for the Tokyo branch of Nacl, the company from Matsue that has been contributing to Ruby since the beginning, hiring Matz as a fellow researcher.

The third one was recorded when the party was over. I was able to reach the couple Yasuko and Koichiro Ohba. Yasuko-san is well known as the president of the consulting company EveryLeaf. She employs several Ruby developers and does Ruby related projects and now mobile development as well. She is an example of entrepreneurship in the community. Koichiro-san works for a Heroku-like company in Japan, managing Cloud based infrastructure using JRuby technology. He contributes and evangelizes JRuby, especially in terms of documentation, localization (internationalization, etc).

On the second day of the event I was able to catch up with Nobuyoshi Nakada-san. He is “the” oldest Ruby Core Contributor, and he probably touched every single part of Ruby. He is also known as “the patch monster” as he seems to be a coding machine, being more active throughout the last 15 years than Matz himself. He deserved to be the first one Matz chose to follow him at SalesForce.com.

Finally, at the Heroku Drink up on the last day of the event, I was finally able to grab Matz himself for an interview. Having been continuously and consistently on this road for the last few years, you can imagine how thrilled I was for having been able to interview Matz himself in person, in my homeland, Japan. But as I’ve warned before, the audio is not good because of all the noise. At least Matz can speak English so everybody will be able to get the most out of this one.

Enjoy them all. This is for all of my friends in Japan! Thanks again for the hospitality.

What many may not know is that RubyKaigi is in its 6th iteration and it has always been organized by volunteer effort. Their leader is Masayoshi Takahashi-san. He is also the founder of Nihon Ruby-no-kai (Japan Ruby Group) which also runs the e-zine Rubyist Magazine. You should check those resources out to see what the Japanese Rubyists are doing. Great resource.

The main group seems to revolve around Takahashi-san and then Shintaro Kakutani-san who works for Eiwa System Management and he is the main Ruby Evangelist in Japan, doing talks all around the country, helping create and organize Regional RubyKaigi, translating books such as the recently released Agile Samurai (from Pragmatic Programmers). As an Evangelist myself, I have to honestly say that Kakutani-san puts me to shame (which inspires me to try harder!). He is doing remarkable work and if you didn’t know him, you should.

The Program Chair for the conference is no other than Dr. Koichi Sasada, PhD in Information Science and Engineering from The University of Tokyo, he runs the Sasada Labs researching on programming languages and its processors. Oh, and did I mention that he is the creator and current maintainer of “YARV”, the Ruby 1.9 series’ heart? You can read a small interview with him from the Rails Magazine.

There are several individual contributors for RubyKaigi that you really should spend some time knowing about. They are very active and very committed. “Friendship”, “effort”, “unity” and most specially “respect”, were words that came to mind knowing some of them.

The Program

Being honest, I can speak a bit of Japanese, but just casually, so I can’t understand more advanced techie-vocabulary, my skills are poor like that, I apologize.

So, it’s a bit difficult to understand some of the most interesting talks presented by Japanese speakers. But they had a nice and geeky workaround. Both halls had the main big screen for the slide projections and also two vertically oriented, narrower screens for Twitter stream projection at the left-hand side (#kaigi1 for the Big Hall and #kaigi2 for the Small Hall – which was not that “small”) and IRC streams on the right-hand side.

This is a clever idea for community driven real time translation. When a foreigner speaker is presenting on stage, the staff would write translations of some of the key phrases at the official IRC stream and anyone could contribute tweeting at a specific hall room channel, which shows in the other screen.

More than that, there was another staff volunteer, Makoto Inoue who helped us foreign speakers to place proper Japanese subtitles in our English-written slides, which really helps a lot. I will come back to Makoto in the last section, hold on.

Unfortunately, though it does help, it’s still difficult to follow more technical talks, such as the talk about ThreadGroup class that I tried to attend. But again, this is something that I want to try in our own RubyConf Brazil. Here in Brazil, because we have Locaweb organizing the difficult logistics of the event, we’re able to contract professional narrators to deliver voiced real-time English to Brazilian Portuguese and vice-versa through wireless earphones, and I can say that this is an expensive investment. I’ll talk more about RubyConf Brazil in another article.

Thanks to Dr. Koichi Sasada and the staff, the program is very well balanced. They had,

Hard-core tech-talks such as:

• The Real Time Profiler for Ruby
• Dynamic Component System and Memory Reduction of VM for Embedded Systems
• Parallel World of CRuby’s GC
• How to read JIS X 3017
• CRuby lock design improvement and why it sucks

Business oriented case talks such as:

• Large-scale web service and operations with Ruby
• Issues of Enterprise Rubyist
• Critical mission system implemented in Ruby

Community oriented and motivational talks such as:

• my own Personal Dilemma: How to work with Ruby in Brazil?
• All About RubyKaigi Ecosystem
• The Gate

A bit less hard-core tech-talks such as:

• Advancing Net::HTTP
• Drip: Persistent tuple space and stream
• Actors on stage
• Use rails_best_practices to refactor your rails codes
• MacRuby on Rails
• Writing custom DataMapper Adapters

And finally some Agile related talks that most should be used to see by now such as:

• Efficient JavaScript integration testing with Ruby and V8 engine
• 5 years know-how of RSpec driven Rails app. development
• BDD style Unit Testing
• Toggleable Mocks and Testing Strategies in a Service Oriented Architecture

And there are many more that you must see. And speaking of which there are even a KaigiFreaks (probably a homage to the venerable Confreaks that you all know and love) volunteers staff group dedicated to stream videos of the conference in real time, record, edit and then organize and merge volunteer-made English subtitles. Editing video is a laborious work and to have volunteers doing it, I really applaud this wonderful volunteer group.

You want more? Lot’s of session video recordings are already available. You can watch the Japanese sessions from the Main Hall Room and from the Secondary Hall Room. This is huge, I just wish RubyConf Brazil video recording contractors could be this efficient! But hang on, this year we will improve on the video services as well.

Opening Keynote – Bridging the Gap

Aaron Patterson, our friendly @tenderlove delivered a great opening keynote. It’s very interesting because you all know that he’s probably the only person that is both a Ruby Core and Rails Core committer, moreover, having the opportunity to talk to him a few times makes me feel like he really “understands” the Japanese-ways. Watch him talk:

http://player.vimeo.com/video/26507951?portrait=0

[16M01] Ruby Ruined My Life. (en) from ogi on Vimeo.

The gist of his talk was about the differences in organization between the Ruby and Rails Core teams. The Ruby Core Team is sort of role oriented, where each committer usually has very specific responsibilities, being the maintainer of certain features of Ruby. There’s even the important role of a “Release Manager” currently held by ms. “Yuki Sonoda”, a.k.a. @yugui, who’s been doing a great job. You can see the list of maintainers in the official Wiki.

Aaron himself is responsible for the YAML parser, Psych, Fiddle, DL. He notes that this kind of organization makes you take more care when messing around someone else’s area. It’s not a deterrent, but you have to be more careful. On the other hand, there are areas that are lacking a full time maintainer. And the other thing is that the release cycle is long, so it takes time for changes and even fixes to reach a broader audience sooner.

The Rails Core, on the other hand, doesn’t have very specific roles, so everybody kind of “owns” everything. But the side-effect is that at the same time no one is actually “responsible” for any particular part. They don’t have a release manager, for example, so there’s no one actively organizing what’s missing to close a release. Again, you saw Rails 3.1 Release Candidate being announced at RailsConf back in May and we’re closing July without a final 3.1 release.

But he’s not stating that one of them is better than the other but instead that they can learn from each other. For example, he made the case that the Ruby Core could be less ceremonious about commits and specially about reverts, people should be able to touch the code without getting afraid of offending anyone. And also that the Ruby Core could put more thought in deciding what should be maintained inside Ruby’s subversion repo and what should be removed and maintained separately as gems, to make it easier for parallel features to evolve independently.

Watch his presentation, he goes on several ideas and also talks about DTrace, other tech stuff and lots of funny jokes.

[TL;DR] The Language Barrier

Aaron reminded us again that many people still complain that there are two distinct Ruby development mailing lists, ruby-core and ruby-dev. The first in English, the other in Japanese. A few paranoid developers even go crazy enough to think that there are some kind of “conspiracy” going on in the Japanese list, stuff that’s decided without ever showing up in the English list. As Aaron said, there’s no such thing going on.

The more usual complaint is always the same “why don’t the Japanese people communicate in English?” And again, the old bad habit of “taking things for granted”. The ignored reality is that the Japanese people, in general, don’t have good English skills. It’s not arrogance, lack of effort, it’s a simple lack of skills.

I’m from Brazil and here people don’t usually speak good English as well. For me, it feels like Brazilians and Japanese have a similar level of English understanding. It’s very frustrating. But on the other hand, it’s also frustrating to see Americans taking for granted that everybody else in the world understands English. It reminds me of that memorable scene from the fantastic movie Inglourious Basterds where Diane Kruger’s character Bridget von Hammersmark sarcastically says:

Gotta love Tarantino :-)

I can’t tell the American’s reaction to that scene, but I’m pretty sure everybody else had a good laugh. Now, seriously, I shouldn’t laugh because we usually only speak Brazilian-Portuguese, which is a language that almost no other country uses. The same for Japanese. But the sarcasm was just to raise the discussion.

It doesn’t feel good when a foreigner expects us to talk his language instead of the other way around. But it’s also not good that we don’t increase our efforts to learn more languages, like Europeans seem to do. I’ll talk more about this in another article.

That said, my point is that there are too many assumptions in communications, and I don’t mean only different grammar or vocabulary. More importantly, there are particular protocols in each culture that we also take for granted and expect that everybody else will comply. But communication between people from different cultures can lead to a lot of misunderstandings. Being geeky, it’s the same as an MSN Client trying to connect to an XMPP-based server :-)

After lunch we had the Ruby Core Team on stage discussing what’s going on in the current Ruby development affairs. Sonoda-san confirmed 1.9.3 for August, with not so many new features, more bug fixes, security updates, stability in general. But they presented a few small controversial features. One in particular was interesting.

We have the private class method to hide particular methods in Ruby. Now they have implemented private_constant to hide class and module names that we don’t want exposed publicly. It’s an interesting feature, though it annoyed some, like Yehuda, a bit.

It was fun (not in the bad sense, please) to see him raise his hand in the Q&A session and state that the Ruby Core could discuss a bit more about new features like that with the other library developers before releasing them. The Japanese Ruby Core team didn’t fully understand what he said at first. Then Matz attempted to translate what he said, but they were still puzzled, until Matz added that it was more of a statement than a question. So the Ruby Core made that “ah, got it!” face and moved on, but Yehuda kept waiting for some answer, kind of feeling ignored maybe.

Again, it’s not my intention to make plain fun out of this, and this was just my personal understanding. But it was an example of a situation where people try to communicate without using the same language and the same protocols. After the session, I was shortly talking to Aaron, Yehuda showed up, and he said that he was actually waiting for some discussion, and we tried to explain that it sounded more like a statement, which is why they didn’t address it.

The Ruby Core Team

Another interesting thing that was not entirely news, but I wasn’t aware of, was the introduction of Shota Fukumori-kun, @sora_h on Twitter. With only 14 years old , he is the youngest Ruby Core committer. He did some work on making the Ruby test suite run in parallel if multiple cores are available. Sounds easy when I explain like this, but it is not. He made several other contributions to Ruby and other open source projects, take a look at his website. I am more and more amazed by the amount of very young developers exposing themselves all around the world. I wonder if this is starting a new trend. Just pay attention and keep looking.

The sense of humor of the Ruby Core was also interesting to see. Yuki Sonoda-san with her kind of serious posture were making lots of small jokes and comments, kind of breaking the ice between the developers on stage. She inquired Matz if they would have a 1.9.4. She complained, kidding, that she wouldn’t like to deal with the maintenance of 1.9.2, 1.9.3 and even 1.9.1 that’s still supported, plus a future 1.9.4. Matz made a funny troubled face and played with the option to delegate it to Shyouhei Urabe-san, one of the maintainers of the 1.8 series. As Sonoda-san moves to 1.9.3 maybe Urabe-san could also graduate from 1.8 to 1.9. They made some fun out of releasing 2.0 instead of 1.9.4 as well. Matz agreed for a while, Sasada-san was against, and they didn’t settle on 2.0 just yet. Just a humorous session between the core developers. But don’t expect 2.0 any time soon.

The only other news around Ruby is that Kirk Haines, the brave maintainer of the venerable 1.8.6 version said that there will be just one more release in the next couple of months to close most outstanding bugs remaining, then 1.8.6 will finally reach its end of life. Rest in peace!

And the last bit is that Ruby will change its license to become BSDL + Ruby. There’s a discussion around this topic if you are interested in license stuff.

Other Sessions

As I’ve mentioned before, RubyKaigi had a very balanced program with several different themes for everybody. I want to congratulate everybody for a very well thought out mix of sessions. As usual, I had the same dilemma that I have in every conference I attend, I either miss sessions because I’m tweaking my slides until the last minute or I’m trying to meet new people, record interviews, do networking.

Thankfully people more disciplined than me not only attended most sessions but also described them (please, send comments with links to other blogs with reports from the Kaigi). One of them is Stoyan Zhekov who wrote three articles, for Day 1, for Day 2 – Part 1 and Day 2 – Part 2.

If you understand Japanese or if you want to test the strengths of Google Translator, you can read the huge report in the Gihyo website made reports for Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3. It’s 21 pages long! (And I’m on Page 4 of the Day 3 Report, yay!) I also recommend that everybody keep an eye on the RubyKaigi 2011 website because I’m sure they will also post links to the slides in Slideshare. And you already have all the video recordings from this year and the previous years as well, so save some time to watch as many as you can.

Books on Sale

I don’t know if this is something that every RubyKaigi had, but they have set a small book selling booth with several nice titles. They were releasing a few new titles at the Kaigi, so they also had a book signing session in the lunch interval where Matz signed several books. The other day, Takahashi-san, Morohashi-san and Matsuda-san signed their brand new book as well. They released books for Rails 3 and Ruby 3 Recipes.

That was great, I had my book signed by all four of them (yay!). And they have several books about Ruby, some books are very specific such as an entire book just on dRuby, another specific for Mac desktop app development with Ruby. They also have several translated books from The Pragmatic Programmers such as The Agile Samurai, by Kakutani-san. Agile is growing bigger in Japan, still far from mainstream, but people are interested.

(TL;DR) Lightning Talks

Special remarks goes for the YamiRubyKaigi (something like “Dark RubyKaigi”) and the next two Lightning Talk sessions. Because it was three days long, there was plenty of time for several quick (5 min long) talks. I was surprised by how many people did talk about many different – and sometimes just funny – subjects. That’s something that unfortunately in Brazil, we are still lagging behind, I have a hard time with lightning talk sessions because they usually have very few people willing to talk and usually the topics are still basic in content. After seeing so many lightning talk sessions from RailsConf and RubyKaigi, I know that we still have work to do here.

A few highlights and examples from those lightning talks are:

• Zenpre a web tool to make it easy to upload your slides at Slideshare, prepare a UStream transmission and make an online video + slides presentation.
• ODBA or “Object Database Access” which defines itself as an unobtrusive Object Cache system for transparent object persistence.
• Rios Proxy a framework for command line interface tools.
• ActiveLDAP is a Rails 3.1 compatible library to access LDAP directories.

There are several other interesting talks that I recommend you to watch. Some are just funny, some are motivational, but it can’t be denied that 39 lightning talks (17 YamiRubyKaigi Talks, 11 lightning talks on the 2nd day, 11 lightning talks on the 3rd day), accounting for around 3 hours and 15 minutes of content is a lot. Congratulations to the community for spending time assembling slides and interesting content and showing up on stage to present them.

And as I promised to my new good friends from Australia, Andy Kitchen and Jonathan Cheng, I will give my support to their brand new and revolutionary software development technique, introduced at YamiRubyKaigi, that would make even Kent Beck rethink his concepts! :-) I present to you: V.D.D

Now seriously, putting some thought in this subject, I always wondered how come I see lots of people lining up to talk at US conferences such as RailsConf and now I saw lots of people again lining up to talk at RubyKaigi. Here in Brazil I usually have a hard time coming up with enough interesting talks to fill one single session.

It’s just another speculative theory of mine. In the US there are several smaller Ruby user groups that keep meeting with certain frequency, such as the Seattle.rb group. I speculate that people start “training” there, showing small talks in front of small audiences, testing the acceptance of their content, then they attend larger conferences. In Japan, the Ruby Evangelist Kakutani-san and Rails Evangelist Matsuda-san have been raising regional “kaigis”, groups, such as Asakusa.rb , inspired by the US user groups. Again, this model helps to raise good speakers, providing space for practice in front of smaller audiences, and only then going to larger conferences.

In Brazil, the Ruby community started late, developed fast, and all of a sudden we already had a large conference such as Rails Summit, breaking an important period of time where the regional communities could grow and mature. We now do have regional communities, but few of them actually gather together, presenting ideas in front of each other with frequency. Most smaller communities only meet online at mailing lists. So most people never presented to smaller audiences, never got feedback, and couldn’t know if their content is engaging or not.

My recommendation: regional communities are awesome, if you’re from some place in the world where they don’t exist, please start one. It always starts like this: with one person, perhaps two, for some time you will feel very small, but persistency and consistency will attract people and all of a sudden you are a few dozen. And you’re practicing social skills, testing ideas, getting direct feedback.

In São Paulo, there are companies such as Caelum Training Center which always supported small communities. They provide a monthly space in their facilities so the regional Ruby group can gather and present their ideas at least once every month. One can tell the difference in quality of speakers that have been training in groups like this. It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect, because it’s not supposed to be. You exercise precisely because you’re still not good. I have presented almost 100 times at events, and I’m still very bad at several points that I need to improve. Perfection comes with practice. And practice comes with repetition and feedback. Regional user groups are a great place for people to practice.

Closing Keynote

Matz closing keynote was particularly interesting. It was the first time I’ve seen him talking live, and it’s the first time I’ve seen him speak about anything different than Ruby 2.0 or RiteVM. He talked about 4 different topics, first about his career, then about pendulums, about PG and the next 100 years, exactly as the title of his talk describes. In general, it was his vision about the future.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/26633560?portrait=0

[18M10] Pendulum, PG, and the hundred year language from rubykaigi on Vimeo.

As you all know, Matz is now a member of Heroku. He’ll have official support to hire some Ruby committers and assemble a full time team to maintain the development of the Ruby platform. He confirmed that he’ll not move to San Francisco and that the pace of development of Ruby should not change that much, at least not at first. He’ll do his work as he has always done it, from Matsue, his home town, and he’ll remain a fellow researcher at NaCl, the Japanese company where he has been working for over the last 10 years or so.

The first developer hired to be a full time employee on that team was the remarkable mr. Nakata Nobuyoshi , the top committer, surpassing even Matz in commits into the Ruby trunk, and one of the oldest and most senior developers of Ruby. Great choice, and expect to watch an interview I recorded with him. He has been contributing in his free time for the last 15 years, a very committed developer that you rarely see nowadays.

Then Matz explained that Japanese programmers like to build their own small languages, something like a hobby. Lightweight Language events have been going on for a long while now. Even highschool students attempt to build their own languages. And he’s been seeing lots of attempts in several places. It would be interesting if the next mainstream language comes out of this. But he also mentioned one of his personal characteristics: “負けず嫌い”, meaning that he hates to lose. Speaking just like this it may sound kind of harsh, but it just means that he is not the kind of person that will sit tight and wait. He will always be looking for new ways to improve his language design. He welcomes the challenge with open arms, that’s what he means, in general terms.

He actually first mentioned that he is “大人げない” literally meaning “immature” but more like “not acting like an adult is supposed to” or just being plain “childish”. It was fun when he dived into the “PG” section of his talk, mentioning the famous essayist and entrepreneur Paul Graham, whose fantastic essays are a must-read to every serious programmer. Matz reminded that Paul Graham created a Lisp-ish language called Arc, but it was not very popular. But imagining the 100 year language, we can improve on current languages, to get to the taste of Paul Graham’s. And there’s this Lisp-ish language called Ruby, invented by a guy named Matz, and this language is popular. So, maybe as a language designer, Matz is better than Paul Graham?? Of course he was kidding, but it was very interesting to listen to Matz himself saying this particular remark, showing his “大人げない” and “負けず嫌い” sides.

He kept saying about his thoughts of the 100 year language, that something like Ruby would still be around. With the current trend of hardware evolution following Moore’s Law, we would not build languages just for the purpose of raw performance, but for the purpose of being hospitable by humans. So his last remark for the future generations was “大人げない大人になろう”, literally meaning “Be immature adults” or also “don’t become too serious” or an even better analogy is Steve Job’s remark at the famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, where he closed saying “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”. It’s a similar advice.

Just before that, he mentioned again that “Rivals are always welcome, of course” … “But I will crush you!” :-) Again, don’t take this seriously, it was explicitly intended to sound comical.

And it was interesting because for the longest time people in the Ruby community have been hearing the meme “Matz is nice and so we are nice.” I don’t recall where this started, but I think everybody that has been in the community for some time knows this. Which is why it was fun to see this other “dark side” from Matz, being “immature” and “hating to lose”. This is great, I think that this side doesn’t contradict the other, it’s just that we can be fiercer without losing kindness.

(TL;DR) The Last RubyKaigi

As I’ve mentioned before, this big event is all organized by the sheer will and effort of a group of very dedicated volunteers. They join every year, for the last 6 years, to put together this great event. You can feel that it’s different from a company-organized event such as RailsConf or RubyConf Brazil. Don’t get me wrong, the quality is on par or superior in many aspects. It’s the mood that is different.

After Matz closing keynote, Takahashi-san made a small closing speech. He thanked all the sponsors, the attendees, and the volunteer staff. It was very nice to see all of them gathering on the stage. I had no idea that the staff group was so large. I felt very humbled by that sight and they deserved the applauses.

But this year’s conference was born from a seed planted last year. I don’t know how far Takahashi-san and the other leaders have thought about this, but if it’s half of what I speculate, I think it’s a bold move.

Before I start, let me introduce you to another Ruby developer from Japan, Makoto Inoue. This year he volunteered to help the foreigner speakers to have their slides translated to Japanese, to make it easy on the real time translators during the talks (Thanks for the help, Makoto-san!). He started his Ruby career because of Rails a few years ago and now he got himself a good position at New Bamboo, in London, the company that also delivered the very awesome Pusher service.

Makoto attended last year as well and wrote his thoughts in two articles that you should read before going on (Part 1, Part 2). In the second part he mentions another article originally wrote by Shyouhei Urabe, a Ruby Core developer. This article is titled RubyKaigi must die and it seemed to have inspired Takahashi-san on the theme for RubyKaigi 2011. Because I feel it’s important to point out, I will quote the article here:

1: The quality of RubyKaigi is unnecessarily high

The fee of Ruby Kaigi (JPY 6000 for 3 days) is way too low considering average conference fees, yet the quality is too high. We should think about how come this is possible. It looks to me that it is relying too much on volunteers. It is as if we are burning the motivation of these volunteers as fuel. I am worried that people get burnt out, and nothing is going to be left in the end. I don’t think buying someone’s motivation by money (= paying money to stuff, or hiring professional event company) is necessarily bad, especially if it helps to sustain the community.

To be frank, there is no structure for RubyKaigi to continue. This is because we were not sure if the Kaigi will continue when we first started. We thought “just give a try”. We continued because its continuous good response, but this is not sustainable.

2: RubyKaigi should be starting point, not the goal

The initial purpose of Ruby Kaigi was to find people (who have contributed to Ruby , or use Ruby for interesting ways) and put spotlight on them. There must be so many Rubyists who kept low profile unless attended Ruby Kaigi. I do agree that it’s a great thing, but that should not be the start point. RubyKaigi is almost like a cradle for Rubyist, but that’s not the end goal. I feel that the number and quality of theses people start outweighing RubyKaigi and RubyKaigi will become constraints to people as it grows.

How can we avoid this? We need some sort of scale up/out strategy such as increasing the capacity of the Kaigi, do it more frequently, or incorporate RubyKaigi as sustainable organisation, but not sure if there are anyone who want to do that. Then the alternative goes to “Stop it!!”.

3: Isn’t RubyKaigi creepy?

I was expecting that someone is going to say this at some point. Why you guys always mentions “Love” or “Feels” good, and everybody gets so moved? That’s so creepy. You need to calm down a bit. Isn’t it abnormal? If you start hearing something sounds smooth, that means there are something else behind.

To say brutally frank, RubyKaigi is an instrument for a few leading people to agitate other people, and this is so called “cult”. It may not be that bad. Having said that, I am insider of the community (NOTE: The author is one of the Ruby core committers), so even I may underestimate this phenomenon.

This is dangerous, because it is a sign of temporarily fever and people soon go away when the hype goes. It’s nice that Ruby becomes so popular, but we have to think about how to have sustainable community, so the further fever should stop. It’s now time to cool down a bit.

That’s all. If you keep saying “It is too hard (to organise)” or “(RubyKaigi organisation) is so fragile”, then you should stop now. RubyKaigi is not all of your life, isn’t it?

So at the closing speech from RubyKaigi 2010, they announced that 2011 would be The Final RubyKaigi. The idea is close this cycle, reorganize and come back. Takahashi-san will found a proper organization to be the stewardship of a yet unnamed new conference that will come back probably in 2013. So 2012 will be the first gap in 6 years of RubyKaigi. It is still unknown how this will be reorganized, but it seems clear that it’s not the end.

Don’t take everything literally, those are wise words that deserve some reflection. So pay attention.

It’s already a great achievement to be able to deliver six consecutive conferences like this. I was involved in three consecutive conferences of similar sizes and I can appreciate the effort. I said it’s a bold move because it takes courage to dismantle something like this. Once you start and you really like it, it’s difficult to let go. But on the other hand you need to step up to the next level once you reach the first ceiling, and I think RubyKaigi served its purpose.

In the US, Chad Fowler, Rich Kilmer, David Black organized the first RubyConf back in 2001 and just after that they founded RubyCentral, a non-profit organization, to organize the next conferences and support regional events. It was very “American” and a smart move that paid off in spades, specially with the following support from O’Reilly and other companies. They are delivering the 11th RubyConf and they just delivered the 6th RailsConf. The “founding fathers” of the American Ruby Community were able to foster a sustainable ecosystem. I’ll come back to this subject in another article.

There are several similarities in the Japanese and Brazilian Ruby communities, there are specific challenges and there are lots of things that I have personally learned in my trip. I will share some of those insights in my next articles, for now I will wrap up my impressions of this Final RubyKaigi by saying that it succeeded in going beyond my expectations and I really appreciate all the effort spent by the staff in putting this great conference together, and I wish them luck in coming back.

Congratulations!

If you don’t know me, my name is Fabio Makoto Akita. Fabio is my Brazilian first name. Makoto is my Japanese first name (considered a middle name in the Western world) and Akita is my family name. I am a 3rd generation Brazilian-Japanese born and raised in Brazil. Many people in Japan asked me about this, hence the explanation here.

Brazil is an Emerging and Developing Country, former Third World. Some assume that the Brazilian culture is very much similar to the US culture, being from the same Western world and having some of the same European roots. And that Japan has a very different culture from both, being from the Far East, the Orient.

Ruby is one of the few open source projects that I am aware of that has a strong US derived community and at the same time another strong Japanese one.

(TL;DR) Disclaimer

I was raised with a very strong Japanese foundation, but at the same time strongly influenced by the Brazilian culture that surrounds my Japanese family stronghold. I was shaped in a country that consumes and incorporates many aspects of the US culture although little to nothing of its inner philosophies.

Thus I’m in the fortunate position of having been raised in both Western and Eastern cultures at the same time. It’s usually not a big deal for most, even for other Japanese raised outside of Japan. But at least for me, it means that I don’t take anything for granted. Explaining will be a difficult challenge, so just assume that decision-making is more difficult for people like me.

I’m not a professional in the field of Social Anthropology. Sometimes I’ll have to victimize myself relying on exaggerated Reductionism. Do take everything you read with a grain of salt. I won’t state “absolute” truths, just conclusions and explanations based on different points of view that are neither good or bad, just different. Try to refrain from thinking in terms of “right” and “wrong” and instead try to understand the subject at hand.

What I’m asking is not trivial. Do not take anything for granted, assume that you’re always influenced from your own culture’s point of view. It necessarily carries lots of prejudices that will lead to biased conclusions, some of them known as common sense. Also do assume that I do understand the side-effects of tools such as reductionism, empiricism and plain old speculation. I’ll assume smart readers.

The challenge for this series and the goal I’ll pursue is to write in order for Brazilians, North Americans and Japanese to understand, already with the assumption that each has its own outstanding culture.

(TL;DR) The Decision to Depart

As a Japanese myself, you can imagine that visiting my family’s country of origin for the first time carries a strong personal importance. At the same time I’m of the kind that enjoys travelling only when there’s an outstanding purpose for me to accomplish.

I would restrain my desire to visit Japan until I had some purpose. Back in 2007, I still didn’t have it. I could go and tell people there that “I intend to make contributions in the future to help the Brazilian Ruby community.”

Who cares anyway? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Results will always overshadow any good intention. I knew it would take a few years but everything worthwhile takes time to accomplish.

Four years have passed since I decided to become a Ruby evangelist, and I finally had something to share, so I decided that it was time. But 2011 has been a very heavy year for me in terms of volume of work, in a positive way. Thus I only started preparing for RubyKaigi around the end of June. I casually sent an email on June, 22nd to Japan’s top Rails Evangelist, Akira Matsuda saying that I might go.

That kickstarted another thread with him and Japan’s Top Ruby Evangelist Shintaro Kakutani saying that one of the international speakers wouldn’t be able to go, so there would be an available 30min slot in one of the parallel tracks. That’s how I ended up as a speaker! This is a good example of Serendipity.

At that time I was buried in work so the visa process had to wait (yep, Brazilians need visas in several countries). My flight was booked to depart on July 12th, Tuesday, and I was only able to go to the Japanese Consulate on July 4th. If anything went wrong, I wouldn’t have any more time to retry. It only served visa requests on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and only from 9AM to 11AM. To make things even more exciting, I was anxiously waiting at the consulate’s office on the 4th and the last required document was hand-delivered to me at 10:55AM, at the 11th hour ! But I digress.

Attending RubyKaigi for the first time, being able to visit Japan for the first time and still be able to talk to the Japanese community felt just like a perfect wrap up for my personal journey. It was a long and very difficult one, but very worthwhile.

Apologize

Four years since I’ve decided to evangelize Ruby, I knew what I wanted to talk about. It was named Personal Dilemma: How to work with Ruby in Brazil?. That would be on July 18th. The video recording of my session was already made available (thanks to the efficient RubyKaigi staff). Please take a look and give feedback, it always helps.

There was one mistake in the introduction of my talk, where I speak in Japanese. I meant to say “I’d like to thank Yukihiro Matsumoto and the Ruby Core, although they may not be here” but I actually said "… although maybe not necessary." How come!? By making the mistake of saying “iranai” instead of “irarenai” or simply “inai” so I apologize for that, I hope people that understand Japanese can tell that it was a mistake from the context.

A Brazilian-Japanese Meets Japan

Before the heavier philosophy and cultural discussion that I want to attempt, let me start light with a simple report of my first visit to Japan.

I travelled to Japan on July 12th. Because Japan is 12 hours ahead of Brazil and because the total time of the travel would take more than 28 hours (11:30 hours from São Paulo, Brazil to Frankfurt, Germany; 6 hours waiting at Frankfurt; and finally another 11 hours to Narita, Japan), I would only arrive on July 14th.

The coincidence is that my birthday was on July 13th, which I basically spent at the airport of Frankfurt. I think that by now you all understand that I was receiving a very big birthday gift. Absolutely no complaints, but as a bonus the flight from Frankfurt to Narita was pretty empty and I was actually the only passenger on my seat row! So I was able to have all 3 seats just for me. Very lucky, really appreciated that.

I landed at Narita International Airport at 3PM on July 14th. It is Winter here in Brazil but Summer in Japan, and it was a very nice, hot, sunny day at Narita. I am of the kind that never counts the chickens before they hatch. I was holding my breath since my company agreed to sponsor my trip and until I cleared the Immigration process and put my feet in Japanese soil, only then I was able to finally relax. So you can imagine how stressful the days prior to my travel were. Anything could go wrong: the visa could not have been approved – as I explained before -, I could have had trouble in the German Immigration, I could have had trouble in the Japanese Immigration. When too many uncontrollable variables can go wrong, you have to plan very carefully and never put your guard down until every risky step has been securely completed. Assuming nothing will go wrong, being overconfident, is what will lead you to fail. Murphy is one busy fellow that never ever rests, and neither can you.

Now, a big tip if you intend to visit Japan for the first time: do not get a taxi cab to Tokyo. Narita and Tokyo are around 1 hour apart. In Brazil, we have a very sad public transportation system, the Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo is located in the city of Guarulhos, less than an hour from São Paulo City, so we usually get a taxi cab. But taxis are very expensive in Japan. My mistake of getting a cab from Narita to the neighborhood of Ikebukuro cost me more than 20,000 yen, more than USD 260! That is twice what I would pay in Brazil for a similar distance.

There is a much nicer solution: the Skyliner, a very fast, comfortable and reliable train line that can take you straight from the Airport Lobby directly to many main train stations in Tokyo, from where you can reach virtually anyplace in the city. And it will cost you 10 times less than the taxi. But, I was tired, I was thinking like a Brazilian, and totally ignored the possibility of the Airport having such an efficient train line a few meters away from the arrival gate.

(TL;DR) Adapting to Japan

I stayed at an inexpensive hotel called Oh-Edo at Toshima-ku in Ikebukuro. I was a bit surprised that my room was very small compared to Brazilian standards – a normal size by Japanese standards I think. Remember, real estate in Tokyo is expensive. More than that, the population density is overwhelming. As a comparison Tokyo has more than 32 million people in an area of 8,000 km2 and my home city of São Paulo has 18,8 million people in a similar area of 8,400 km2. So, twice the density in average!

July 14th was Thursday and I arrived at evening. After I dropped all my luggage and rested a bit, I decided to explore the Ikebukuro neighborhood. As an explanation for my background, I have spent several years of my childhood learning Japanese, absorbing the culture and even the pop culture. It was very common for the São Paulo Japanese community to import VHS tapes with several Japanese TV shows, dramas, movies, music shows all recorded. So every week we would go to a rental store (there were a few well known in São Paulo in the 80’s and 90’s) and watch a few tapes through out the week. We had a gap of around a month, I think, which was the average time spent for ship delivery.

More than that, specially through the 90’s I was an avid manga and anime fan. So I also consumed several hundreds of volumes of manga written in Japanese and another hundreds of hours of animes. The sheer volume of content that I was able to consume in more than 10 years meant that I almost knew every aspect of Tokyo city and its surroundings without ever having been there. I knew all in theory, it was time to experience in practice. But it means that I had almost no impacts or shocks whatsoever. It was a process of validation of knowledge more than anything which I believe is different from what a non-Japanese person would feel being there.

While many people would think that this is a lot and I was probably very dedicated, this would not be true. Many Japanese from the 2nd or 3rd generation, raised around the 80’s and early 90’s would show the same behavior. I would even guess that I am under the average of Japanese knowledge if you compare many from my generation. There are several Brazilian-Japanese that can read, write and speak flawless college-level Japanese, which is not my case.

Another thing is that I have not been practicing my Japanese for several years now. My Kanji skills are bad, possibly remembering less than 300, which is less than what a 3rd grade student has to learn. To be able to read a newspaper, for example, one has to know at least 2,000 Kanjis. This means that I was able to behave, listen and speak properly – although with a flaky vocabulary at times – but I wasn’t able to read every sign in the streets and stores. Some key signs have English subtitles, making it a bit easier.

If I remember correctly, Tokyo was not a planned city, so there is no logical organization as the city grew organically. But some common features of the major neighborhoods is that there are some main large avenues surrounded by grids of very narrow streets (no sidewalks, barely large enough for one car). Buildings are very near to one another, giving a very compact feeling to city blocks. The buildings that are not in the main avenues are usually very narrow as well. This is the result of the sheer population density; it simply can’t waste any space at all. If you have the chance go visit the Odaiba neighborhood – unfortunately I didn’t have time to go there myself – but it is built over the sea, showing how the city is looking for ways to find more space where there are none.

Another thing that confuses foreigners is that in Western countries the address system usually has streets and avenues with names and each house or building with a number in a linear ascending order.

For example, the Oh-Edo Hotel is located at Tokyo-gun, Toshima-ku, Ikebukuro, 2-68-2. Sounds weird? Addresses in most parts of the Japan, on the other hand, are described from the name of the municipality (Tokyo-gun), the ward (Toshima-ku) than 3 numeric identifiers divided by district (2-choume), the city block (68-ban), the house number (2-go) which, by the way, is not in any particular recognizable order, most probably numbered by order of construction within the block.

So, without a map one can’t navigate through the city. So another tip is that I was fortunate enough to have printed the Google Map’s map of my hotel, which the taxi driver was able to use to come close to the hotel area and, even with this, we had to stop to ask for directions. So, do buy a City Guide with maps of the main regions so you won’t be completely lost! And every time you want to go to a new location, print a Google Maps’ map or ask someone to write a map in a piece of paper. You won’t be able to go blindly to new locations within the city trusting only in the Western logic of street names, linear numbers, crossings, etc.

The Ikebukuro area seems to be a very famous one, with several commercial blocks and a mix of convenience stores, restaurants, game centers, small night clubs, karaokes, a very busy area at night as well. Everything was at a comfortable walking distance from my hotel.

Transportation and Entertainment Efficiency

The primary way of transportation within Tokyo is definitely their super efficient railway system. According to Wikipedia there are a staggering amount of 882 interconnected rail stations in the Tokyo Metropolis, 282 of which are Subway stations. It is estimated some 20 million people use rail as their primary means of transport (not trips) in the metropolitan area daily. In comparison, the entire country of Germany, with the highest per-capita railway use in Europe, has 10 million daily train riders.

At São Paulo we only have 62 stations, where 3.6 million people ride daily. I am personally ashamed to present this aspect of my city to foreigner friends. The public transportation problem is nothing short of awful. For Brazilians, a railway system the size of the Japanese one is something only imaginable in science fiction. It was really overwhelming to enter the huge Ikebukuro station for the first time and feel lost, as a small lab rat in a maze looking for the exit.

The only thing that I knew was that from the Ikebukuro station I would be able to find the Yamanote Line, which goes to several landmark neighborhoods such as Akihabara and Shibuya, which I intended to visit on Friday, 15th. I didn’t locate them in the map at first glance, but talking to the station clerk (and this is where speaking Japanese is really helpful). Most Japanese understand a bit of English but they can’t speak in a very fluent or understandable way (more on that later). If I walked near the walls I would see the many many line maps and I would eventually find it but it was easier when he explained me that I should look for the JR Line. Instead of “Yamanote” which is the Line name, the signs pointed to the private company maintainer name, the “JR”, which is short for East Japan Railway Company. So whenever you see JR in the station signs, they refer to the Yamanote, which is a circular line that goes through several well known locations within the most busy area of Tokyo.

First, I went to Shibuya, which has several clothing stores, malls, restaurants. A good place for shopping. By the way, several of the main train stations have malls built over them, they definitely want you to consume. And another thing you will notice is the sheer volume of visual noise all over the buildings, several colorful and giant advertising outdoors spread out over the city making for a very colorful and busy landscape. This is similar to some busy places of New York City for example.

Contrast that to my home city of Sao Paulo, the 4th largest metropolis in the world. In 2007 our mayor banned all outdoor advertising. It was quite a successful program, the publicity market complained but other than that people accepted it. Most will say that the city looks much cleaner now and I agree, though it’s a bit sad that it’s now quite greyish and boring at the same time. It doesn’t help that contrary to Tokyo we have few trees and green areas, limited to small patches of vegetation and a few parks in the city.

Speaking of which, it reminds me of the problem of urban pollution. We suffer a lot in Sao Paulo where we even have a common saying that “in Sao Paulo people can ‘see’ the air they breathe”, quite literally true as you can see a yellowish heavier pollution layer in the horizon covering the city. I personally felt like the air in Tokyo was much cleaner than I’m used to. Probably not as good as in rural areas, but for a metropolis as big as Tokyo I think they are holding up pretty well.

Next step was Akihabara, or just “Akiba”. If you want electronics and geeky entertainment, that’s the place to go. It is a huge area filled with electronic stores, manga stores, several “maid cafes”. Remember to bring your passport for the duty free discounts.

As a curiosity, Japan has a large music industry. But the Japanese take the word “industry” quite literally in which they actually mass-produce idol singers. Head-hunting self-made talents is still done but it’s usually more difficult and takes longer. Instead, they will make market research, design a long term plan, make huge auditions to find potential young candidates that can be inserted into the process, raised, given special education, singing classes, dancing classes and turned into professional idols. Robots could almost replace them and no one would notice.

(TL;DR) AKB48

Wait a minute; they are actually going that path!

From Akiba you will find AKB48, one of the most radical “entertainment products” that I’ve seen this industry deliver. It’s a huge group with 48 idols divided into Teams A, K and B. They even have Trainee idols! The idea is to enable fans to have a closer contact with their idols in their own theater at Akiba, therefore having many idols help them to better distribute the schedule. The idea seems to have fans more engaged in the future of the group, almost like a next generation reality show, one that has been going for more than 6 years already.

AKB48 is in the Guinness World Records as the largest pop group ever – obviously. That’s an idea that I can understand, from an Asian context, but I can’t see it delivered overseas outside of Asia (Korea, China have similar “tastes” for pop idols). It’s so radical that they even created a computer generated idol mixing features of the body and face of some of the real idols from the group. The fans were shocked when she was identified as not being a real person! Go figure!

Watch the TV commercial featuring the new idol:

Were you able to identify which one was the CG model? Now take a look at the making of:

Back to the Tour

I have digressed a bit, so back to the report. Friday ended, now Saturday marks the beginning of RubyKaigi, which would take place at Nerima Culture Center. Looking the maps I figured out that I could take the Seibu-line from Ikebukuro station directly to Nerima, so there I went. A less than 15 min ride in the train left me right across the street from the conference center, piece of cake.

I will leave the RubyKaigi specific report for the next article, so I will keep talking about my city tour for now.

So, while I was attending the conference I didn’t visit any other places. One curiosity was that on Monday 18th, the day I would deliver my talk, I went to the Ikebukuro station to get the Seibu line train. I was kind of tired because I was working on the final tweaks for my slides at morning, so I didn’t realize that the train was taking a long time to get to the destination. It was supposed to be a 15 min ride.

Then, I was looking out the window and realized that the city was getting less and less crowded, fewer buildings, less people. I was heading to the suburbs! I jumped off at the next station, at Musashi-sakai I guess. Quiet place, felt almost like countryside. I looked more carefully at the line map and realized that there were at least 6 different train routes served by the same Seibu line! So I got another one to go back to Nerima. That whole trip took me more than an hour, but it was worth the learning. So be very careful: every line can have trains go around different routes, they are all named properly, it’s just a matter of paying attention.

By the way, for foreigners it helps a lot that inside the train, there’s always recordings saying what’s the name of the next station, what other lines cross the same station in case you need to change lines, which side of the train will open for exit, and they say it in both Japanese and English. Also, most maps have Japanese and English written versions.

Even the ticket selling machines have options for English menus and options. You just have to look at the map and find your station. There will be number codes next to each station name. That’s the price of the ticket. Then in the ticket machine you touch the button with that price and insert the coins or bills. It’s usually around the 130-190 yen range for most stations.

If you decide to change lines in the middle of the route to go to another station, there will be machines to adjust fares. Save the ticket after you enter the train, you will need it to exit in the other station or to adjust the price or you can talk to the clerk next to the exit passages to adjust fares. Japanese citizens usually have rechargeable smart cards called Suica and others such as Pasmo and Toica. Japan has dozens of different smart card systems that you will see written in many places inside the stations, trains, buses.

Last Few Days

The next day after the conference I visited Ueno an area that is neighbor to Akihabara. Shintaro Kakutani-san was very kind to let me visit his workplace at Eiwa System Management. After that Akira-san guided me to the Tokyo branch of NaCl, the consulting company where Matz himself works. Finally, I went to Hatsudai, near the Shinjuku area, to meet Alencar Koga, a Brazilian-Japanese living and working in Japan for almost 20 years. He guided me through MTI the company he works for and that created famous mobile products such as Music.jp, Japan’s second largest music distributor. I’ll talk a bit more about them in my next article.

The Hatsudai station is particularly interesting. I think it’s not within the major stations such as Shinjuku, Ueno or Ikebukuro, but it has a great architecture, very large, and it is next to the Tokyo Opera City Tower that you can access straight up from the station and which serves several business companies such as MTI and even the Japanese Apple branch.

Next day, Wednesday 20th, would be my last day in Tokyo. I wanted to visit a few key places so I headed straight to Asakusa. Careful not to mistake it for “Akasuka”. I wanted to see the famous Kiryuu-zan Sensou-ji, the oldest temple in Tokyo. You know me for not being a religious person, but it was not the reason I wanted to go there. I respect history, specially my ancestor’s history. It was a very powerful and emotional moment for me to see the temple with my own eyes and just stay there, standing still.

There was also this large red box where people go to throw in some coins and worship or make requests. I did throw a few coins but then the only thing that came to my mind was not a request, but a few words of appreciation and acknowledgment, that’s all.

It was a cloudy and rainy day but it didn’t annoy me at all because it actually added up to my feeling of relaxation and calm, especially in the temple. After that I headed to Ginza, which is said to be one of the most luxurious places in Tokyo, specially if you have lots of money to spend. It is akin to New York’s 5th Avenue. As any other district in Tokyo, there were a few large avenues surrounding the same compact blocks behind with the same very narrow streets.

Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to visit it thoroughly. So I just walked through one of the main avenues taking pictures. It’s very overwhelming. Each big brand has its own big façade in a big building – I don’t know if they own the entire building or only the facade – but you will be able to recognize several of them, such as Tiffany, Prada, Salvatore Ferragamo, Abercrombie and more. If you intend to visit Tokyo, reserve an entire day just for Ginza, it’s well worth it. Actually, the ideal trip would be to reserve at least half a day for each major district in Tokyo. That can easily fill up an entire month of vacation there.

I couldn’t stay more at Ginza because it was almost dusk, and with a cloudy weather it would get dark fast. I wanted to visit the Tokyo Tower before that so I could take at least a few visible pictures.

I had a Tokyo City Guide book with me at all times which was very helpful. But the guide did have one mistake: it said that in order to visit Tokyo Tower I should go to Roppongi. But asking the station clerks they said that I actually had to go to Kamiyacho station! Thinking about it, I think the rationale of the book authors was that Kamiyacho seems to be an small area not worth having a whole chapter in the book. So the next important area is Roppongi, then they just added Tokyo Tower there. Again, that’s why you should not rely on just one foreigner source of information. Asking the local people is always the best and Japanese are always very helpful and kind.

When I arrived at Kamiyacho through the subway, it was raining, it was also getting dark fast, but I was able to arrive to Tokyo Tower very fast, walking just half a kilometer. Now, the tower is beautiful. You pay a small fare to be able to get in and ride the elevator to the observatory station, 135m up. The Tower itself has 333m, making it 10m higher than the Eiffel Tower. I visited the 1st and 2nd observatory floors but unfortunately I didn’t have much time to visit the top Special Observatory. But it was good enough; it was much more interesting than I thought it would be. The observatory is pretty large; they have gift stores and a very cozy cafeteria in the 1st floor from where you can take a cup of coffee while admiring Tokyo’s aerial view through the large windows.

In the 1st floor there’s this Club 333 where all Wednesdays and Thursdays they will have small shows. I was able to see a live music show by indie singers where they made several cover performances such as Nate James’ Impossible song.

At the base of the tower there is this three story building with another cafeteria, even a McDonald’s, and several souvenir shops (Japanese love souvenirs, which we call “omiyage” and “meibutsu”).

There was even a small gallery with an ancient Tokyo theme, having paintings by Tomonori Kogawa. If you think those paintings remind you of anime, you’re right as he worked as an animator for famous studio Sunrise in the 80’s. There were several items and explanation texts as well. Many foreigners will probably recognize a Geisha but not many will realize that even Geishas obeyed a very rigid hierarchy system! Respect for hierarchy is very serious up to this day and it’s ingrained within the Japanese culture.

As I’ve said, I am an avid Manga fan. So the Tokyo Tower was the background for several of my favorite titles, such as Clamp’s Rayearth, so more than a tourist landmark that provides good pictures, I like to think of it as having a more personal meaning, as it showed up many times in my youth.

Small Consideration about Sushi

Finally, I left Kamiyacho and headed to Roppongi. There I took a few pictures of the famous Roppongi Hills, a very ambitious piece of engineering. A huge complex for offices, shops, theaters, and more. I only saw its façade, and again didn’t have time for a full tour inside. But it is surely a huge complex, where the subway station has corridors going straight inside the complex.

At Roppongi I met Koga-san again for dinner. We casually found a sushi restaurant and as I didn’t have sushi yet, I thought it would be a good opportunity to try. Koga-san recommends going to Tsukigi where you can find the “Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market”. This is the place to find the most fresh fish in Tokyo, thus it is also the place you will probably find the finest sushi and sashimi available. That said, it was already late at night so I decided to stay at Roppongi where I was certain that the “average” sushi would be much better than the finest sushi in Brazil. And I was right!

Sushi and sashimi in most places of the Western world (North and South America), are just crap. Western people underestimate sushi altogether. It is a simple delicacy that takes years to master, exactly because it is so simple. Simplicity means that you can’t fake it: it’s either well done or a disaster. And I can only find bad sushi in America, no matter where I go. There are very few good ones, for sure, but rare. So it was an absolute pleasure for me to taste such a good sushi. It was the very first time I tasted “real” sushi. You must order “Oh-Toro” the fatty cut of the tuna fish and the most delicious ingredient in sushi. A good Oh-Toro literally “dissolves” in your mouth. Absolutely delicious. Can’t find enough words to describe it, you have to go taste it to understand.

Pro tips: Never ever fill up a dish with lots of shoyu (soy-sauce). It’s an absolute sin to dunk the rice part entirely into it. You’re supposed to taste the fish and the rice, not the soy. You only need a small touch of shoyu in the fish part. So you have to turn the sushi upside down when touching the soy dish. That’s very difficult to do with ohashi (chopsticks), but nigiri-sushi was meant to be hold with your fingers, this is the correct way of eating sushi. And good sushi is made to be eaten in just one bite. Put it all in your mouth! You also don’t need extra wasabi in the shoyu dish as the sushi chef is supposed to put the correct amount between the fish and rice roll. And this rice roll is supposed to be small, solid and not break apart easily. And no, cream cheese and all those “fancy” ingredients are not real sushi.

Now you know that you’ve been eating crap sushi and in the wrong manner. I always get very frustrated every time I hang out with friends to a sushi restaurant, so I am just expressing my many years of frustration in those last few paragraphs. It had to be said.

(TL;DR) Some Personal Aspects I Like

Anyway, Tuesday and Wednesday were cloudy and rainy days, but that was good because the weather was so hot. Friday night, 15th, I experienced my very first earthquake shake. I was reading a magazine in my bed and I felt a slow movement, at first I thought that maybe I was fainting but a few seconds later I saw that the walls and ceiling were actually moving. It was a very weak earthquake that lasted for only a few seconds. Only enough time for me to sit down in the bed and wonder if I should go underneath the table. While I was trying to figure out what to do, it stopped. It was quite fun, I never thought I would be able to feel a real earthquake. Brazil has no natural offenses such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis or anything like this.

Then, on the early morning of Wednesday 20th, they said there was a Typhoon striking Japan as well, but I overslept and by the time I woke up it had gone already. You have to reflect on this: Japan is a very small country, with less than 380,000 km2. Mato Grosso, the 6th largest state of the 27 in Brazil, has roughly 360,000 km2. My state of Sao Paulo has 248,000 km2.

Worse than that, 10% of the active volcanoes in the world are located in Japan. According to Wikipedia there are at least 1,500 earthquakes registered every year. There are minor tremors happening everyday somewhere in the country.

A reflection that always comes to my mind is that natural hazards such as that make a population much stronger and disaster tolerant. Because of so many natural disasters in Japan such as earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis and even the so discussed Fukushima disaster recently, it really makes for a very strong population. For example, because of the so frequent earthquakes, Japan is the leading researcher in prediction of earthquakes and on advanced civil engineering that allows them to build skyscrapers that can literally shake several meters without crashing down.

Human beings will always attribute a higher value to things they don’t have. So for a Japanese, living in a natural hazard free place, with large open areas with vegetation and forests, places to plant fruits and vegetables, where the weather is warm and cozy, is nothing more than a far dream.

For Brazilians, on the other hand, this is the reality. And we take it for granted exactly because we have no idea what natural hazards of those magnitudes are. The same thing can be said for war. I am being over simplistic, I know, but peace is usually highly valued for those that experienced times of violent warfare. People that were born and raised in peaceful times will not give it enough value.

“Value” is given to stuff that are rare. If you have too much of anything, you don’t feel like it’s worth much because you take it for granted. Something to reflect about, but again, I digress.

From the photos you can see that Japanese streets are very clean and organized. Even the inside and hidden streets are very clean. The main avenues rarely have bubble-gum marks in the asphalt, indicating that people don’t spit them in public. You shouldn’t even smoke in public places, so you won’t see cigarette butts in the streets. There are usually reserved areas near the stations called “smoking areas”. You can only smoke at those areas or within shops or special closed smoking rooms with proper ventilation and air filters, and this allows for a very clean landscape.

There was this one thing that I knew Japanese had and that I know you will laugh when I tell you, but keep reading. It’s the Washlets ! It is a special toilet seat. In the Western world we clean ourselves using our hands with toilet paper and throw it in the toilet trashcan. Think about this: we bring our hands very close to very dirty material. We dispose that dirty paper in the trashcan where it can accumulate for a few days in the bathroom. It’s not exactly a heath hazard, but it just feels dirty. So this special seat will spill a jet of warm water directly at your anus, cleaning it up before you get toilet paper to dry it. I don’t know about you, but it feels much cleaner that way. Virtually every modern Japanese building and house will have this Washlet available.

If you’re a foreigner be aware of those. It is not unheard of foreigners pressing the water spray button without knowing about it and getting surprised by this warm strong jet of water all over him. I don’t know if it’s a common feature of all of them, but they also constantly flush it automatically. As I mentioned, real estate in Japan is ridiculously expensive exactly because there is so little land to share. So normal Japanese houses are also ridiculously small, narrow. Just so you have an idea, larger districts such as Ikebukuro, Shibuya have capsule hotels. Instead of you renting a room in a hotel to spend the night, you can rent a sleeping capsule, which you can rent to spend the night in case you missed the last train back. It is very small, you can only stay laid down inside.

It is also not rare for a small residence to not have a bathroom at all, so the building will have a shared bathroom. And you can only have a shower at public bath houses (sentou) nearby. But as you may think, this is not considered something “low” or only for the “poor”. It is a quite normal thing. As I will repeat many times, do not judge someone else’s culture by your own standards.

And this is not to say that every Japanese has perfect cleaning habits, they don’t. Public areas can even be cleaner than their own houses. The reasoning that I speculate is that if you have a small house, you’re single, and you usually don’t take any guests inside, you will probably not clean it up well enough. On the other hand, the façade of your house is visible to anyone and you don’t want to be perceived as someone with poor cleaning habits, so you will keep that part cleaner.

(Cultural note: this article is huge, I know, but I can bet money that the only thing some of my fellow Brazilians will comment is this toilet section, such is the nonsense of the Latino-way).

Japanese people are very aware of their public image and they will keep it always clean, both physically clean, but also in terms of politeness and formality. Japanese people are much more formal than Western people, even in small circles of close friends. They won’t assume a higher level of liberty between each other unless explicitly said so.

When I visited MTI with Koga-san, we went to a nearby Pub. There we found some of his co-workers. So, Koga-san bought 2 bottles of beer for everybody. Even though they know each other and are considered colleagues or friends, because Koga-san has a respectable position in the company, they made a lot of ceremony and thanked him a lot, more than we usually see within western people groups. Another curiosity, in bars with friends, you usually don’t fill up your own glass. It’s the duty of the person next to you to keep your glass full. And this is not to suck up, it’s just very normal daily formality. Japanese have several social protocols that they follow automatically, this being one of them.

Finally, two last things I have to report. I never felt safer in my entire life. I walked through many places all around, and I never had the feeling that I could be robbed. I could open my wallet, count money while walking, use my video camera, my phone and I never thought of anything bad happening, such is the security level in one of the largest metropolis in the world. I would never do half of what I did here in Sao Paulo, nor in New York City. I would always be looking over my shoulders, I would be careful while looking into my phone or taking pictures. This is a huge difference. I think only Canadians and some North European citizens can assert the same.

Then, there is the transportation system that I said so much about. There is one more thing: they are punctual. And I don’t mean, “more or less”, or “sometimes”, they are “perfectly punctual”. If the train is scheduled to arrive in the station at 7:37AM it will arrive at precisely 7:37AM – otherwise what would be the point of not rounding up the numbers? The margin of error is around 1 minute. I didn’t see any train getting late. Japanese people have a high pride for punctuality, and it shows. This is one of the very few places in the world where you will witness a system that actually works as promised.

If you add the relaxing feeling of security and the systems and processes that work perfectly all over the city, it physically makes you less stressed than in my city of Sao Paulo. Here I have to be constantly worried about security and I become very stressed because of traffic, late appointments and systems and services that don’t work. It’s difficult for people that don’t live in big metropolis to understand how big a difference it makes. I was very relaxed all the time in Japan, no worries whatsoever. When I came back to Sao Paulo, it all came back to me, all the worries, all the frustrations, all the stress. Painful, really.

Farewell

I wanted to stay a few more days but it was not possible. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to visit a few other areas that I had previously in mind, such as Harajuku. But at least I was able to visit many of the places I wanted, specially Akiba and Asakusa, which were in the top of my list.

In the last day, I got a taxi cab to Nippori station, but just because my luggage was very heavy, otherwise I would walk to Ikebukuro station then to Nippori. From Nippori you can buy the Airport Express Skyliner ticket, it’s less than USD 20 if I’m not mistaken. It has marked seats, it’s very very comfortable and goes straight underneath the Narita Airport. It can’t be more convenient than that, I wish we had something similar in Sao Paulo.

There are several aspects of the Japanese culture that I will explain in more detail in the next articles, this was just a wrap up article for what’s to come.

I came back to Brazil yesterday and I am still recovering from the burn out of the trip. I am still thinking on how to tackle this complex subject. But I do want to tell the story and explain most of what I can.

Until then, I’ve compiled 3 small trailers to get you wondering what’s to come:

Enjoy!