First Week in Japan

Konnichiwa...i`m finally in Japan!

Well...the past week has been like a roller coaster ride with more twists than a Tom Clancy book.

OK first, on April 3rd, during check in at Nadi Intl. Airport, I met Lara Dutta (fomer Miss World and Bollywood actress) and Kunal (actor). They had come to Fiji for some yoga thing and were returning to India via the Sydney flight. The airport was quite empty so I got the oppurtunity of a lifetime....to have my photo taken with them! do you believe that? I`ll post up the pics as soon as i get a laptop with Windows and all PCs i have used so far here at the Uni. of Tsukuba have different OSs.

The flight to Narita was around 9hrs. We touched down at exactly 5.15pm (JST) and I boarded the express bus to Tsukuba at 6.45pm, just like I was supposed to. On reaching Tsukuba City, there were two staff of the Int. Student Center, who guided us to our dormitories.

OK, I now have to stop as I am currenlty blogging from the University Central Libraray and I don`t know if I can use the PCs for "non academic" work. Ja mata!

Last Days in Fiji

The month of March was by far the fastest month I had ever experienced...its the last weekend now.

Earlier in the month, I received an email from the Intl. Student Center of University of Tsukuba giving me instructions on how to reach Tsukuba from Narita Airport.This caught me a little offguard as I was expecting someone from the University to meet me in Narita. (This was the normal pratice for previous MEXT scholarship students). However, browsing through Narita Intl. Airport's website, I saw that it had quite comphrensive information: its possible to find out, in advance, the terminal one will be arriving at, flight information on the site is updated every 10 mins and detailed floor layouts of the two Terminals are also provided. I also came across other great sites that gave useful tips, such as this one.

I am to catch the 6.50pm Express Bus from Bus Stop No. 10 of Terminal 2 (Air Pacific flights use this terminal) after buying the ticket from the 1st floor (arrival lobby). So, going to Tsukuba from Narita by oneself is not too great a deal. The only tricky part is that my flight will land at 5pm and I have a little less than 2 hours to clear through immigration and customs (which involves fingerprinting, photographing followed by an interview), buy the express bus ticket, make a call to the Intl. Student Center to inform them I'm on my way and then board the 6.50pm bus bound for Tsukuba.....so I hope I have enough time.If not, I'll have to spend the night in some hotel around Narita and then proceed to Tsukuba the next day as no one will receive me in Tsukuba Station if I board a bus after the 6.50pm one.

As I still had some space left after packing my luggage, I thought of taking some fijian souvenirs with me to Japan. They might come handy if I visited Japanese homes. I took a friend along to Jack's Handicraft and got a couple of handycraft items.I also emailed Prof. Yuta to let him know about my arrival and he told me that I would allocated a desk in the Roboken Lab although I have been initially be enrolled into the intensive Japanese language program.

On Monday 17th March, we were invited to a dinner hosted by the Japanese Embassy at the Golden Palace Restaurant in Victoria Parade, Suva. Here, I got to meet some current MEXT scholarship students who were in Fiji for a break: Ronit Prakash (who coincidentally is an undergrad student at the University of Tsukuba), his girlfriend Monica (a Polish student studying in Japan) and Dipal. As Ronit is also a gakusei at the same university and Faculty as I'll be going to, he told me that he'd help me out once I reached Tsukuba.

From the 18th to the 20th, and on the 25th, Dilpreet Kaur (the other recipient of the MEXT scholarship) and I had gone through an elementary Japanese language training classes in the afternoons at the Japanese Embassy. Conducted by Leone (a former MEXT student), I found these classes very informative as Leone shared with us his experiences of his stay in Japan.

I also took time out to visit Prof. Godfrey Onwubolu, who was my MSc supervisor, at U.S.P. He had worked with Prof. Yuta in his robotics lab in 2003 so I thought of talking to him to get a few hints about studying in Japan. I also contacted Sunil Lal, a former lecturer of mine, who is currently studying for his PhD at the University of the Ryukyus to get a rough idea of what it would be like studying for a PhD in Japan.

Finally, on Friday 28th March, we were invited to morning tea with the Japanese Ambassador, His Excellency Ambassador Namekawa where he formally presented us with our tickets and visas to Japan in front of the media and some selected guests. Later in the evening, we were invited to dinner at the Ambassador's residence in Princess Road, Tamavua. As this was the 25th Anniversary of Fiji Monbusho Alumni (the Japanese Govt has been sending students to Japan for 25 years now), many former students were at the dinner. Amongst others whose names I didn't get (sorry!) , I met Subash Appana, a management lecturer AT U.S.P who twice went to study in Japan and Savita Singh, a lecturer at the Fiji School of Medicine (FSM), who I learnt was in Japan for 7 years. I also had my first Japanese meal here. Let me see if i remember the dishes that were served....chicken, egg cakes, Japanese noodles, prawns, squid, eels, tuna and various other seafood. I wasn't feeling too adventourous so I decided to spare the eels. As for the squid, I tasted it but decided that wasn't for me either. At dinner, I found myself at a table with Mrs Namekawa, the most friendlist of ladies and Ambassdor Namekawa himself came to Dilpreet and I several times to see that we were okay. Here is a picture of Dilpreet and I that Kanata-san (Embassy staff) took of us.

Meanwhile there are 4 more days left to go to before I leave Fiji...

About this Blog

Ok, first a bit about myself and then this blog. Here is my personal homepage that has a little description of me (a little outdated though) ; my hi5 profile is here; I am fijiclassmates.com member no. 3217; my graduates.com profile is here and my public gallery is here.

Anyways, I attended Swami Vivekananda College (1996-2000) in Nadi, Fiji. From 2001 to 2003, I was an undergrad student at the Uni. of the South Pacific studying BSc majoring in Computer science and Electronic Engineering. In 2004, I continued studying for Postgraduate Diploma and mid year, I joined the Fiji Institute of Technology as a Lecturer in Computer Engineering in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. From 2005 to 2006, I studied part time for MSc in Engineering (Details of my Msc theis project may be found here). Then came the break I was waiting for. Based on research emanating from my Msc studies, I presented a paper (my first) in Dec 2006 at the Third International Conference on Autonomous Robots and Agents (ICARA 06) held at Massey University in New Zealand. I received the award for the Best Student Paper for this paper and accordingly, I was invited to write a chapter for the book "Autonomous Robots and Agents" in the book series Studies in Computational Intelligence.

At the conference, I had met Prof. Shin'ichi Yuta (a Fellow of the IEEE, one of the HIGHEST ranks in engineering) who heads the Intelligent Robot Laboratory at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Then in July 2007, I applied (the 3rd time!) for the Japanese Govt Scholarship and with Prof. Yuta's recommendation, I was subsequently awarded the scholarship in April 2008.

So, having already studied at university once and then given a second chance to relive the "golden years" by studying for a PhD in the country with the 2nd largest economy in the world, a country that possess more than half of the world's industrial robots, and that too in a University that has been ranked in top 9th-17th in the entire Asia Pacific region, I thought of capturing the moments that I would want to recall 20 years from now by creating this blog and documenting some of the more salient events about my stay and studies in Japan. So thats why I created this blog and I'll be frequently posting up details here.

Well thats the prologue of this blog. I received my interneary this week...will be flying to Tokyo (Narita) on April 3rd so I still have about four weeks to conclude my lectures at F.I.T, assess my students and hand over to my section head.