I’m here in Tokyo to attend the WWW2005 show. I’d thought about trying for a geeks/bloggers gathering, but I’m only here briefly and the Sun Japan people have set me up with a bunch of meetings; mostly with people who’d like to hear about blogging and syndication. I thought it would be easier to show than talk, so herewith some words and pictures about this trip to Japan.
Narita Geometry
Frankly, I’ve always hated Tokyo’s Narita airport: crowded, lousy services, and way, way too far from Tokyo. This time I got through pretty quick even though, for the first time, Customs kind of shook me down: the young woman—who was a real babe, no small achievement in those silly uniforms they have to wear—showed me a paper with pictures of narcotics, pornography, guns, and live animals and wanted to know if I had any, and then actually went through my bag. Previously, my admission-to-Japan experience had been along the lines of “Canadian passport, yawn, next.”
This time of years, the rice paddies are full of water with the shoots just showing; I got two shots, from the air and from the airport bus.
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The conference is in Makuhari, an ultramodern kind of place in Chiba, which is quite a ways from Tokyo proper but part of the vast Kanto agglomeration that slips into my mental “Tokyo” category. By local standards, this would be low-density office space.
