You Gotta Love Japan

Yesterday, Yumi and I moved to our new place near the seaside in Yokohama. I am acquiring quite a backlog of topics to write about but with work, moving, the PhD still looming and the wedding, finding blog time is more difficult. In any case, I'll try to address the move (it was largely uneventful and went pretty smoothly) and new apartment in another post but I do want to mention two related items.

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First, last night after the move and some unpacking we treated ourselves to a sushi dinner. I love sushi and there is something about the restaurants with the conveyor belts which carry the sushi around that I particularly like. It's so unlike any other dining experience -- very Japanese. The coolest thing was at the end of the meal. As the plates come around you just take the ones you want off the conveyor belt, eat them, and stack up the plates which are color-coded by price. Typically, at the end of the meal, a young woman comes over and totals up the bill by adding the price of each plate. Last night, she came over with some scanner which I had never seen. She waved it over the stack of plates and that was it! Instant electronic bill. How cool! The other thing is that one of the two trains I now take to work is driverless! I envision a futuristic science fiction plot where the train becomes possessed and out of control driving us to our deaths. This all reminds me of a great faux article I read in The Onion about a fictious Japanese earthquake and how it took the country back to the year 2147.