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.

Newsline

This week my blog was syndicated on newsline.linearcollider.org. If this is how you found my blog, welcome, friend of the linear collider.
I hope you like what you find here.

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.

Moving

Not my favorite pastime.

Unfortunately, in a field as international as particle physics, it kind of comes as part of the job.

This time, we lasted only a year before we had to move on, albeit this was not job-related, but rather landlord-related.

Luckily we were able to find something close by, so the move was less stressful than others had been.

So we can still use the same voltage for our appliances, and even the plugs are the same (You would think that something as trivial as a plug would be easy to standardize across borders. I'm sure it actually would be, but apparently there is no interest in this. Maybe with the opening of the European job market, this will change. I hope people don't attach something like national pride to the design of their plugs.)

So now all our stuff has changed places again. I can't really call the move finished, because we had still a large fraction of our stuff in boxes before the move. But move number 7 in the past 11 years is in the books. Here's to hoping the next one won't be due for a few years.