US-Japan connections

Finally our household arrived at our new place a couple of weeks ago. My wife is putting in a lot of effort to get everything out of the boxes to build a new home for us.

When I moved from Japan to the US, I did not only take my wife and my household with me, I was fortunate enough to convince my new employer to also let me bring my research.
International collaboration is of course one of the enabling factors of the ILC, and fortunately, frameworks exist already to enable collaboration in all kinds of scientific experiments. Together with my colleagues in Japan, we put forward a small proposal under such an umbrella, the U.S.-Japan collaboration. Last week, we hosted a delegation of Japanese and U.S. scientists as well as representatives from DOE at PNNL, where the different proposals under this umbrella were reviewed. Our proposal to establish distributed computing between the two regions with the goal of accelerating the detector optimization studies and  improving the distribution of collaborators from the two regions across the two detector concepts, was approved for funding.

Now I'm at the ILC Tokyo symposium, where we heard from a Diet member why the Japanese population is declining, and what the government intends to do about it. The talk was very interesting and a lot more technical than I would have expected from a politician. It was humbling to see how our vain little experiments can have a much bigger impact.
The spirit of the meeting was very positive, and things seem to be moving in the right direction. I look forward to the next few months. They will be very busy, but they also hold a lot of promise.

So long and thanks for all the fish

So it's done. Just handed over the keys to my apartment in Sendai. Another move in the books. Well, technically not quite, since our household is still in transit, so we can look forward to another round of buying furniture and unpacking boxes.

The last year in Japan has been a great experience. Of course my wife being Japanese helped with some administrative items, but comparing the quality of life in Sendai to e.g. Geneva, I think that Japan can hold it's own. Food is great, the people are friendly and accommodating, and the countryside around Sendai is stunning. For the ILC, a few more trailblazers are needed to make the path smoother in some areas, but that's not unexpected. So if you are a young postdoc with a bold mind, an appetite for adventure and good food, and the desire to broaden your horizon a little bit, go apply for a job in Japan. The ILC community is eager to help you make your time a success.

My time here is coming to an end for now. (After the Belle / Belle 2 meetings)
So long Japan, and thanks for all the fish. I'll be back.
(Next time for the ALCW meeting in April, to be exact )

Next Step: To write grant applications to pay for a couple postdocs. Stay tuned.

Around the world in 80 months

A new year, a new job, a new continent...
Sounds like I've read that somewhere before. Now I'm going full circle. Starting at the West coast of the USA, in San Francisco, pretty much exactly 80 months ago, I embarked on a journey to Oxfordshire, UK, on to Canton Geneve, Suisse, then to 宮城県、日本。Starting in January 2015 I will be joining the staff of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I am particularly pleased by the fact that I am cast as a physicist, not a particle physicist. Of course, I will stay involved in particle physics, but the lab has many interesting projects that I hope to contribute to. I look forward to proving that the training of a particle physicist enables one to have a positive impact on a variety of other subjects as well.  At the same time, I am confident that I can take advantage of the diverse capabilities at the lab for my research in particle physics, in particular for building an ILC detector that can deliver on the promise of precision physics in the Higgs and electroweak sector.

Now I will have to change my tag line. I have graduated from my journeyman days.

The ILC site visits

In my role as the deputy LCC Detector R&D liaison, I have visited the recent workshops of the SiD detector and ILD detector collaborations in Tokyo and Oshu City, respectively. The purpose was to give an overview of where we are in the process of documenting and advertising technologies developed for the Linear Colliders.

While I generally enjoy my work, there was an even more fun aspect to these workshops. Both were coupled with a visit to the ILC candidate site in the Iwate prefecture. One started from Ichinoseki, the other one started from Oshu City. Both of these cities are candidates to host the ILC campus. From my home in Sendai, it's 34 minutes by Shinkansen to Ichinoseki, and another ~30 min by local train to Oshu City. That's pretty much commuting distance.

The local support for the ILC is very visible. There are ILC banners at the lamp posts in Ichinoseki, which you can see in Google Street View, for example, or, of course by just wandering down the streets physically rather than virtually.

Around the planned site there are several signs of support, like the two pictures to the left.

The area around the planned site is very rural. During the visits, several references were made to the nature and to the peaceful and quiet environment. The construction of the ILC will certainly change that, but hopefully, the operations phase after construction won't be too intrusive. The exact location of the campus and the sizes of the site campus and the science city are still under discussion. While some people might enjoy living close to the site in rural Iwate, others will prefer the proximity to shops and businesses of the science city. Or, like me, to live in Sendai.   

Japanese Culture Week

Japan is known for its rich culture. Food is a big part of it, and I am thoroughly enjoying sampling my way through the whole range of culinary offerings so far.

The last week of April, however, took my cultural education to the next step.
I was invited to a traditional Japanese tea ceremony of the type "Shogo-no-Chaji". The whole course took about 5 hours. (Usually it's only 4, but the host was giving us special treatment.) I cannot possibly describe it in words. Suffice it to say that it was a great honor. If you ever have the opportunity to participate in such an event, do not miss it! Sorry, no pictures. There wasn't really a good moment to pull out my cell phone and aim it randomly at objects and people...

The other very Japanese event is hanami - the cherry blossom viewing.

Every year the particle physics group celebrates the beginning of spring with a barbecue. If you've never had yakisoba at a barbecue, you don't know what you're missing.

The first month in review

The first month in Sendai has certainly been rather eventful. The excitement of the new environment hasn't worn off, yet, but fortunately I'm starting to become more productive. I still don't have my household, yet; apparently that will take another month. On the other hand, I do have:

• registered myself at the ward office (if you live east of Sendai Station, your ward office is surprisingly far away from the station).
• opened a bank account. This took about two hours, but it was rather straightforward (given the fact that my wife speaks Japanese). Unfortunately, I don't have a Japanese credit card, yet.
• met (most of) the graduate students. Seems to be a great bunch. I look forward to working with them.
• introduced myself a number of times to different groups. I find myself sharing different bits of information each time, just to prevent myself from getting bored.
• bought a six-months bus pass. I'm not an avid driver.
• signed up for a new cell phone plan with a data flat rate. This helped me survive several weeks without a laptop. See also my previous post.
• registered with a new certification authority (KEK) for a grid certificate. Apparently, moving between different certification authorities is not foreseen on the grid. I can currently not delete my old files.
• started to get involved with some of the different research projects that we work on at Tohoku University. I plan to post a bit about each in turn in the coming episodes.
• accepted the job of deputy Linear Collider Detector R&D liaison. This task will most certainly provide material for future blog posts as well. My responsibility is mostly to facilitate communication. To ensure the best achievable performance and cost-effectiveness of the detectors it's important to encourage the widest possible participation in building them. The Detector Baseline Documents for ILD and SiD have been written, but the detector collaborations are still in the process of being formed. Now is the time to get involved with the detector concepts and help shape the face of these collaborations. If you work on particle physics detectors and care about Linear Colliders, please make yourself known.
• not really studied as much Japanese as I had planned. Back to work.

Japanese Identity

Here in Japan you prove your identity on official documents not with your signature, but with a hanko.

This is a quick shout out to a hanko shop 判子屋　near nihombashi station D1 exit in Tokyo that worked extra hours to get us our hanko before the holiday break. If you need a hanko or some other writing material, I recommended you pay them a visit. Turn right at the exit and then right again after the bridge.

Apartment Hunt in Sendai

Finding a suitable place to live is an important part of the moving process. Each location comes with its own specific challenges, which are usually compounded if you are not a citizen of the country you live in. If you are a particle physicist, chances are you know what I'm talking about.
In Geneva, finding a place to live takes a couple months in my experience. Once you've found a place, as a postdoc you probably need to find a guarantor, and enough money to cover the deposit amounting to about three months of rent.

The housing market in Sendai is thankfully much less crowded, giving you a much larger choice of apartments. The approval process, however, is rather prohibitively difficult for foreigners:
After finding an apartment on one of the Japanese-only web sites, you contact the agency for a viewing appointment. If you like the place, you need to get approved for credit, which is basically impossible for a foreigner without a Japanese bank account. (Which I am sure you can't get without a permanent address in Japan. The typical catch 22 for foreigners.) Luckily (?) there are companies who help with getting approved - against a not insubstantial fee. I addition, you still need a Japanese guarantor; apparently retired people don't qualify for this.
When you have all of this together, you need not one, but two hanko - the Japanese replacement for signatures on legal documents. This is a stamp of your name and it uses a special ink. Apparently there is simple version, mitomein 認め印, and a more complicated version, jitsuin 実印, and to sign the rental agreement you need both. You can get them at a hanko-shop, and then they need to be registered to your name at the ward office.

Like I said, prohibitively complicated. For foreigners Tohoku university has a number of resources.
http://www.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/cms/?pg=100113145442
https://www.cefix.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/house/default_e.asp
http://www.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/cms/index-e.cgi?pg=130527113858
There are a number of reasons why I chose to go to the open market instead, and for the ILC I'm sure some people prefer to live on campus, while others rather live in the city. Enabling this choice is one of the action items when the ILC gets approved.

A new year, a new job, a new continent

I will be joining the Tohoku University group at the beginning of next year. This is an exciting opportunity, but it required yet another international relocation.
A few lessons learned:
- Do not move between the years, if you can avoid it. The holidays complicate everything.
- Give yourself enough time for visa applications. 2 months is not too much, particularly if paper work needs to be sent back and forth.
- Give yourself enough time to sell your stuff. In particular electric gadgets that operate on a different voltage than what you find in your new destination.

With the new year I plan on updating the blog with accounts of the research in my new group as well as situations I might encounter as a European in Japan. That's at least my new year's resolution.

Now I need to find a suitable apartment. Wish me luck.