robbieinjapan.com

So I walked into my local convenience store (called “conbini” in Japanese) to buy some breakfast for tomorrow when I happened to look into the drink section and saw something called “Pepsi Ice Cucumber”. When I saw it, I thought, “only in Japan…”

Ten minutes later, after I had returned to my room from the convenience store, I turned on my computer. I opened up my web browser and my home page, yahoo.com, came up, showing some headline news articles that included this one: Cucumber-flavored soda sold in Japan – now, how exactly cucumber-flavored soda makes front page news, I’m not sure, but I suppose it is pretty crazy. Take a look at the link, there’s even a picture of the soda.

It seems Pepsi has recently been trying pretty hard to break into the Japanese market. Recently, they released “Pepsi NEX”, a “zero calorie” soda. The ads for this thing are on TV all the time and I often see poster ads on the walls in the train station. As a result, I think Coke recently released “Coca-Cola zero” which is their “zero calorie” soda. I’m pretty sure they released this in response to Pepsi NEX because the label looks almost exactly the same… they use the all black label which Pepsi NEX was the first to use.  Additionally, the label for “Coca-Cola zero” features the word “zero” in big letters under the name “Coca Cola” which is exactly what Pepsi does on their label.

Additionally, I’m not really sure how “Coca-Cola zero” differs from “No Calorie Coca-Cola” which has been sold for quite a while here. The “No Calorie Coca-Cola” is essentially Diet Coke since the label is exactly the same as the diet version of Coke back in the US, that is, the gray background with the red lettering.

Actually, I just looked at the ingredients list for “Coca-Cola zero” and “No Calorie Coca-Cola”. They are exactly the same. The only difference is that “No Calorie Coca-Cola” has 7mg of sodium while “Coca-Cola zero” has 8mg of sodium. I’m not exactly sure how much this changes the taste. Interestingly enough, Pepsi NEX has a little more than double the sodium at 17mg.

In any case, the difference between “No Calorie Coca-Cola” and “Coca-Cola zero” seems to be pretty small and perhaps clearly Coca-Cola’s response to Pepsi NEX since Coke’s new label clearly mimics Pepsi’s. I suppose in this case, marketing is just as, if not more, important than the actual product.

Given that, it seems that Pepsi’s new move into the Japanese market is the cucumber soda. This would never work in America… but who knows, maybe it’ll do well in Japan. I doubt it though, but I guess I’ll have to buy it once just to see what it tastes like.

As you know, my boss and co-worker have come to Tokyo recently. I don’t think I’ve actually explained on this blog what job it is that I do. Over the last summer, my friend Mike, who is a student at MIT forwarded me a job offer of a research project in MIT’s Sloan School of Business that was looking for someone with an economics background who could also speak/read/write Japanese, as well.

So, since I’m an economics major, have studied Japanese for a while and was looking for something to do during the summer, I naturally applied and they later accepted me. Last summer, I went and lived with Mike at his fraternity in Boston which was really fun. I ended up working on a couple of projects, but the main one was the one whose boss is here now.

There’s a hospital in a Shinjuku ward that implemented a system which records electronically a whole lot of data. For example, there are records of when an injection is ordered, when the injection is mixed in the pharmacy, when it is transferred to the nurse’s station, when it is injected, etc. There are also records for if this injection order is cancelled or if it is re-ordered, and whether or not it is thrown away or returned to the pharmacy.

Since we had all this data, our project analyzed it and also analyzed work flow using something called System Dynamics to analyze how nurses mixed injections, etc. This is the first time that my boss and co-worker have actually come to Tokyo and seen the hospital. So, they’re doing that and also continuing to work on the project.

My job mainly involved translation of documents from English to Japanese, Japanese to English and some analysis of the data. When I first started working, I had to translate a lot of documents about the data from Japanese to English and I had to do a lot of work translating column headings for the data. After that, I worked on analyzing the data including figuring out a way to calculate the top five most costly drugs for the hospital that were wasted due to cancelled orders.

Recently, which I’ve been working on now, is translation from English to Japanese which is pretty difficult. I translated my boss’s presentation which he gave and I have begun to translate some article which he wrote on the work we’re doing. Going from Japanese to English is easy enough since I can write natural English and don’t have to worry about that. Going from English to Japanese, however, poses that problem of not just only understanding the language but also being able to write it naturally in the target language. I, of course, get my Japanese friend to help correct me after I’ve written it all, lol.

So, some of the results of the project so far have been to suggest a way to mix the top 5 most costly drugs separately from the others. Because these top 5 most costly drugs are most likely to be cancelled resulting in waste, they should be mixed later, thus increasing the chance that they could be saved if they are cancelled since mixed drugs have to be thrown out but unmixed drugs can be returned to the pharmacy. From our simulations, if our changes were carried out, we could save the hospital millions of dollars per year.

The purpose of my boss and co-worker’s trip, then, is to establish a bit of a relationship with the hospital (since they only know a few guys who have come to Boston), to see a bit better for themselves how things work at the hospital, and to possibly set up a test run of their proposed changes in one of the hospital’s wards, perhaps.

As Japan’s population continues to age, it’s increasingly important that costs and time are saved in places like hospitals. My boss and co-worker actually gave a presentation to Japan’s Ministry of Health yesterday, one of the Japanese government’s most important ministries.

It’s pretty exciting to see the project and be apart of it. But, let’s see if I can get this translation done…

Today I went back to the hospital. This time though, instead of going to the hotel to meet my boss and co-worker and taking them there, I went straight from my dorm there. This was probably one of the more confusing trips I’ve had to do. First, I had to switch trains two or three times which I can handle pretty well since I’ve had used the train systems here for quite a while now and am able to read the Japanese signs. The real problem was that one of the lines, Toei Oedo, actually doubles back on itself.

So, at one particular station, I had to get off the train and then switch to another train that was technically on the same line but going in a different direction. It’s not just a matter of crossing a platform to the other side, either. The actual platform when I came back was somewhere else.

As for the first time, I left the train, walked around a bit and then got on to the right train going in the direction I wanted. I looked around and realized the people seemed familiar. It was the same train I had gotten off a few minutes ago! Apparently, that time, the same train went on to the other part of the line (since the line doubles back on itself, there are two tracks for the same line in the station). However, when I came back, the train was going to continue on to a different part of the line and I had to switch platforms to get on a train that was going to go on to the right section I wanted to go. Pretty confusing, eh?

In any case, we had more meetings at the hospital and it was interesting to listen to how they spoke Japanese and see how things worked out. I’d write more about it now but unfortunately I have class tomorrow and it’s late again already, so I’ll have to say, yet again, that I’ll write about it later, lol.

Today I met my boss and co-worker from my summer job. They came to Tokyo a few days ago and today we all went to the hospital on which we were doing research.

I was able to speak quite a bit of Japanese with the people there and they showed the powerpoint presentation that I had translated recently so that was pretty fun to see.

There are quite a few interesting things that happened there but I’ll have to write about them tomorrow or in another entry since it’s already past 2am and I have class tomorrow…. and a kanji quiz on top of that, lol.

One of the things I don’t like here is using coins. As a result, I have a whole bunch of them… probably hundreds of them in my room here with me. Most of these coins are one yen or five yen coins because I attempt to use the larger ones. I’ll put the 500 yen coins (worth about $4.16) and the 100 yen coins (about 83 cents) in my pocket and try to use them throughout the day instead of the lowest denomination bill, the 1000 yen bill (about $8.33).

The ten yen coins, on the other hand, I save up until I know I’m going on the subway/train somewhere. Then I take maybe 30 of them and use them all for my tickets.

The one yen coins and the five yen coins don’t get much of a chance to be used. They are usually not accepted in any kind of machine… like the machine at the train station, for example. As a result, I have many of them and I’m not sure what I will do with them.

I have one plan, though, and I think it’s going to end up happening. At the very end of my stay here in Japan, I’m going to take all those one yen and five yen coins and go to the nearby jinjya (Japanese Shinto shrine). Then I’m going to take the hundreds of coins and throw them into the coin box they have there. Throwing in money is part of the ritual when you go to a jinjya. However, people normally throw in larger coins, like at least 100 yen coins… sometimes they even throw in bills if they’re praying for something really big, lol.

I wonder what the shinto priest will think upon opening his coin box at the end of the week and findind hundreds upon hundreds of one yen and five yen coins? lol, I’m sure he’ll be able to put them to good use somehow.

So, I did pretty well on the test overall. I was able to study for almost all of the different sections. There was, however, one section that I did not study for because I did not realize it would be on the test. That particular section involved a part where they take example sentences from our grammar explanations, remove one word from each sentence and jumble those words up at the bottom in a word box. We then have to fill in the blanks left by the missing words.

Luckily though, this is where my studying and general living outside of class came into play. The words that they put in the word box are always the most obscure, rare words from the sentences because they really want us to study them. However, I knew most of the words from outside of class anyway.

For example, they had the word ??(yudan) which means “unpreparedness, negligence”. I remember that when I was back home in America over the two month long break they had here, I was playing someone on MSN Messenger in a game. When I won, I was teasing her and she kept saying ????? which means something like “I was unprepared” or “I wasn’t ready”.

There was also the phrase ??????(saizen wo tsukusu) which means “to do one’s best” or “to do something to the best of one’s ability”. I came across this word in a manga (Japanese comic book) that I’ve been reading recently. One of the characters is studying for the entrance exam to the prestigious ???? (Tokyo University). He says some phrase like… if no matter if he succeeds or fails in the test, as long as he did his best, that’s what counts. So I learned that phrase from there.

And another example comes from even more recently. If you’ve been reading my blog, you know I’ve been doing translation work. One word that keeps popping up all the time in my translation is the word ??(kaizen) which means “betterment, improvement”. Actually my online dictionary says it could even mean “incremental and continuous improvement”. In any case, I’m translating my boss’s presentation and papers about the research he’s been doing to improve the system at a Japanese hospital in Tokyo for ordering, mixing and administrating injections to patients. So, obviously, the word for “improvement” is going to come up a lot.

I’m glad to see that my interaction with Japanese outside of class was able to come in and save me during the test, lol. None of those three words/phrases are particularly common. I actually know at least three or four other ways to say “improvement” in Japanese that are a lot more common than the one I described in the preceding paragraph. So, my work/reading/talking outside of class does actually help me learn Japanese, it seems. Of course, I didn’t just see these words in my conversations/manga/translation once and then learn them. I put them into my notecard program on my computer (Mnemosyne) and learned them by having the program flash me those notecards repeatedly over a long period of time. In any case, I’m glad my vocabulary has improved greatly!

Took my Japanese test today. I’ll write about that tomorrow since it’s too late now to write too much.

Class for me started at 9 and ended at 6 today. At 6:30 or so though, I went to a Chinese restaurant with my classmates and my teacher from my Economics class. My teacher was kind enough to pay for all of us.

This is a cultural thing in Japan. I remember when I was in high school, taking Saturday Japanese classes, they had a bazaar of sorts one weekend. Our teacher wanted to buy us a certain kind of ice cream there but we tried to decline since we didn’t feel comfortable that our teacher would be paying for all of us, since, hey, she’s our teacher. In any case though, she stopped us and told us that in Japan, it’s rude not to accept. In the end, she paid for our ice cream, lol.

My Economics class is in English, so there are quite a few international students there. The people who were able to go to dinner afterwards were me, a Turkish girl, a guy from the Dominican Republic and a Japanese guy. When our teacher told us that she was going to pay for all of us, the guy from the Dominican Republic and the Turkish girl started to protest. I didn’t say anything because I remembered my past experience in high school, lol. Our teacher, in response, just said something like, “No… I’ll pay, this is how we do things in Japan. Just ask him” and she pointed to the Japanese guy and he was like “yeah”.

So, all in all, I got a free dinner. It was a pretty nice restaurant though very small… there were only a few tables I think. I still wonder how all these small places are able to make enough money to support the workers and also stay open. In any case, I had ramen and gyoza there, both of which were very good.

I had no morning classes today since it’s Thursday so i was able to sleep in So far, I’m on track with my translation of the new document. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it all done by Sunday in order for a Japanese friend to proof-read it to make sure my Japanese is not too crazy. Then I’ll give it to my boss by the Monday deadline. Speaking of which, my boss and co-worker will be coming into Tokyo very soon and will be starting their meetings/presentations next week I think. They’re still working out their schedule but I’m pretty excited to see how things go. Hopefully I’ll be able to attend some of the meetings and presentations.

As for class, tomorrow is the second big test of the semester! I’ve been busy studying the reading, grammar and vocabulary today. Hopefully I’ll do well tomorrow. For now, I’m going to get ready for sleep since it’s almost 1am.

Another late night… it seems I have another translation project, even longer than the last one and due by Monday. At least this time, it’s an article so I get to translate full sentences in paragraph form rather than phrases and statements here and there (I’ve mostly translated PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets for my work).

It will take quite a bit of time though. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it done in time! My boss and worker begin making presentations this coming Monday I believe.

Anyway, today, I went to the Friday’s in Shinagawa. Today was one of my Japanese friend’s, Taro’s, birthday. I love eating at Friday’s and this was the first time I had ever been to the Friday’s in Shinagawa so it was an interesting experience… I always go to the one in Shibuya. It was actually pretty nice, perhaps nicer than the one in Shibuya since we were sitting at a table right by these huge floor to ceiling windows that looked out upon a nice grassy, leafy area (amazingly non-concrete).

When we were returning from Friday’s to Shinagawa Station, we were standing by the entrance/exit saying our last goodbyes when a woman came up to us and asked “Do you speak English?”, when I said “yeah”, she said something like “oh thank god” and started telling me something about how she was looking for her hotel. She seemed pretty lost and slightly desperate. lol, I can’t blame her… Japan can be really difficult if you can’t read or speak Japanese. Not only is Tokyo a huge and confusing city, but people don’t speak English very well and all of the writing is in Japanese characters so it poses some problems to foreigners. Luckily, my friend Taro lives in Shinagawa and he speaks English pretty well so he was able to show the woman where her hotel was.

I, on the other hand, was able to escape and go through the ticket gates returning home with some of my friends. Tomorrow will be another day of class and translation.

Unfortunately it’s late again and I have class tomorrow so I must go to sleep but at least I did get one good thing done by staying up… I finished the translation of the presentation that my boss and fellow worker will do when they come to Tokyo. I still haven’t talked about what my work is exactly but I’ll do that in an upcoming blog entry.

In other news, a friend of mine from Middlebury came to Tokyo recently and I went with him and another Middlebury friend to a Mexican restaurant. Surprising that they have Mexican food all the way over here in Tokyo, Japan. It was actually pretty good… and I don’t even like Mexican food that much, lol.