Looking for volcanos

Typing with one hand here and prying eyeballs open with the other... periodically my brain just shuts down. Between larvae today I looked out the lab window for a while and was amazed at how hazy it was. Was it fog? Pollution? While staring Atsuko walked by and asked if I had noticed the smoke, and she said she didn't know what it was, maybe a volcano. A volcano! Whoa. I walked out of the lab to see Dr. Kuromi headed for the door with binoculars and so I followed him to find the whole lab out on the deck staring at the smoked world and wondering what it was. Atsuko said that a volcano had cause the big Niigata earthquake last year and so she wondered if that was happening again. Hmm. There was nothing to be seen with the binoculars and we all went back to work. I can catch the Japanese news tonight and figure out what it was. Ha.

Still working on language skills. I had some interesting "safety beef" on rice for dinner (people are extremely careful about beef here, so the place Atsuko and I went to was known to have Australian beef and they call it safety beef). It was very good so I said "Oshi-oshi" meaning "good-good" but pronouced it wrong and said "cow-cow." I suppose that did apply to the situation.

Gotta get home and find my brain. I think it's in my pillow.

Kanji Issues

I forgot to mention that yesterday's seminar was an hour and a half with no cookies. It's hard core here.

Atsuko helped me with the laborious task of getting a pre-pay phone here, and it involved a lot of writing of my address (in Kanji) so when we got back to the lab she showed me how to write it. I wrote my own address on the envelope to send in to Vodaphone and when Atsuko checked it and promptly busted up laughing. The spacing is very important, it seems, and rather than write "Gun" as part of "Gunma" I wrote that I live with the sheep and horses. I then changed a Kanji on the self-addressed front of the envelope as many people do to make it a more polite letter, but wrote the Kanji in the wrong direction as I hadn't noticed the entire envelope was oriented vertically and the address was also vertical. It's good to entertain the locals!

Another Kanji-related story: There is a fascinating system here that the bosses use to know where everybody is. It's a magnetic dry-erase board with everyone's name on the left and 9-10 different categories to slide your little magnet into if you are in the lab, at a seminar, home, out, on a trip, in a meeting, at the animal center, giving a lecture or at the library. As everyone's name is in Kanji, it became a lab project to figure what the Kanji for my name would be. Naturally, my name means evil (Ja). For those who always thought so, there you have it. My Japanese teacher at Sokendai had written that on top of my little name card at the end of class and kept apologizing but I didn't know why until I showed it to Dr. Kuromi and he said "Ah! Bad. We change." Dr. Ueno took the name card for a while and it came back with a meaning like a merciful person in the night with the sound of a moving river, and Funk meant rich, stability and a castle. Atsuko borrowed the name card the next day and it came back meaning sleeping snake and breeze of a blush apricot, but Homma-san the secretary made a name tag a couple of days later and put it up. It has breeze of a blush apricot and then something like smell of a deer that noone understands. It seems I am doomed to either smell or be evil.

Today I had the shakes and dissections were frustrating. I got one Lat A done but then the next 3 died before I could finish the analysis. The Lat A may be frying them a bit as well and tomorrow I will try a lower concentration and shorter incubation time. I found a burger and fries for dinner, but I am still experiencing the culture because I practiced my Japanese when I ordered it.

I'm going to crunch a few numbers tonight and try and convice myself I have good data. Dr. Kuromi seemed excited when he was looking at my pictures, but I think I need to do the experiments again. Why does my foot hurt?

Smelly Deer in a Windy Apricot Orchard

The methionine cycle in Japanese

Drugs today at last, and results so far as expected. I can't post them on this site because someone will somehow steal my project and I will die with nothing. The fan or senpuki was a spark of genious and I no longer have to sleep on the diningroom floor so I've been in a superb mood all day which unfortunately can lead to singing out loud while doing dissections which was safe to do at 10pm back home but here there are still 2-3 people working. If I could imitate Celine Dion well that would be one thing.
I attended a Japanese seminar today. Dr. Kuromi thought there would be some pictures and figures I could follow along with and he was right and I'm glad I went. It was a true fish aquarium experience, Janel in her own little world listening to science progress and not understanding more than an occasional expression like "that's right," "yes," and molecular words at random with sore wa and kore wa indicating this and that which was mostly Kanji bullet points. The presenter was Dr. Ishii from the 4th floor, and his talk was about sphingosine-1-phosphate signalling and the methionine cycle. These are crazy pathways in English, looking at them in Japanese was probably just as useful as anything else. As far as I could tell he has knocked out a couple of spingosine-1-P receptors in mice and found some gliosis in the hippocampus, but maybe not as nasty a phenotype as some other people reported due to a different genetic background in his mice. The embryos looked kind of crappy with dark stuff in them, and I copied down a cool looking Kanji to later find out it meant "blood clot." He then showed a drug that looked like spingosine but I don't know what he did with it. He switched to the methionine cycle then and talked about homocysteinemia which sounds bad, and some mice he had with a cystathione-gamma-lyase knockout or a CBS knockout. CBS is an enzyme that does something to cysteine. Maybe I should know these things. There was a really funny joke that went over my head, and in the end it seemed that maybe some of those mice had a problem in milk production and some cells died. I couldn't catch the major purpose of his stuff, but on the way back to the lab Atsuko mentioned she had trouble catching the point of the research so maybe I didn't do so badly. The questions at the end focused on free radicals so it would have been nice to know what they were talking about. Maybe I'll get there someday, the anesthesiologist/grad student at the desk next to mine taught me how to have a nice conversation about whether or not there is a television at someone's house. He also taught me to say "you look so young!" which can come in handy any time. It's good practice, the sentances are so completely backwards from English that anything helps.

I guess I'm missing lab meeting at home. That's weird. I got my own dustbox today. That's a garbage can. Later!
Janel

Another day in the lab

It's hot here! Progress in the lab today, Dr. Kuromi thinks I have graduated from practicing FM1-43 staining and should sail into drug experiments. The Jasplakinolide came today, but I will start with Latrunculin A tomorrow looking at readily releasable pool loading and unloading. High frequency loading will be the next set of experiments and last Saturday Atsuko introduced me to the evil electrode puller. It's an odd one, vertical, and they burn the tips of all of their suction electrodes. Atsuko is firmly convinced that if you don't do that you will damage the nerve and I believe her! It's a very good new thing to add to our long list of reasons why ephys just doesn't work sometimes. Speaking of which, how are things going with the electrodes now Carin?

I tried out my Japanese yesterday in an attempt to buy a prepay cell phone to use here. My language skills are going to need some work. I can ask great questions, but heck if I know what they are saying back to me. Then they look at me really confused because obviously I know Japanese pretty well to ask such great questions by why do I keep saying I don't understand the answers? I must be dumb or something. I get a lot of whistles when I ride my orange bike around. I never get this kind of attention in the states. I have to ride fast because it's hard to keep a straight face and ignore them long enough to get out of view. It's weird. Gunma is out in the sticks. In Tokyo foreigners are ignored.

The food situation is going to be okay, don't worry. I have identified my usual items at the grocery store and as soon as I figure out how to work the stove I can add some spagetti and other primitive dishes that I know how to make. Atsuko brought me some food today. Hehe. I guess I worried her with my last display of lunch. When we went shopping last week she helped me pick out some interesting things to try so I stuck a few in my bag with some chopsticks so I could blend in with the crowd in the cafeteria, but as soon as I emptied it on the table they busted out laughing. The sour apricot things are supposed to go with rice and after trying one I understood why. The jelly thing is supposed to be eaten with some sort of tea, and the pbj sandwich in the middle set off the strange look. I cannot read Japanese, I do not know what any of the packages say about rice or whatever hehe. I had a weird dream about my sister eating live octopus and somebody named Prince Andrew taking me on a date to MacDonalds. Does anybody know a Prince Andrew?

My neighbor is an American guy and his family including cats and a dog named Virgil. I flew out of the house this morning after hearing cat meows, but after sifting through a bunch of bushes I found the big fat furry cats on the other side of the neighbor's screen door. I know there is a wild one out there. Hopefully he'll drop by for his breadcrusts soon. I think if I leave milk out in this weather I'll kill him.

This morning I was later than usual getting out of the house (rough octopus dream), and had the tar scared out of me by a loudspeaker outside my door yelling in Japanese. I figured I was off to prison. I went out and it was the high school next to my apartment with all of the windows and doors open and some kind of drill going on to start school at 8:30. Good grief.

I suppose I should get on home. Lots of drug work tomorrow. I successfully asked for a fan today (Senpuki arimasu ka?) and got one so perhaps it won't be so hot. After the octopus I woke up and it was so hot I just moved to the diningroom floor. Not terribly comfortable.

Later!
Janel

Earthquake No. 1!

Well that was interesting. I was on the scope last night when I whipped around because I thought someone grabbed the table and started shaking it. Maybe a 2 sec earthquake. I'm not too crazy about being on the 7th floor if this happens often, but people just live with it here and Atsuko came in after it happened and gave me an earthquake education lecture. There was a nasty earthquake in her hometown a while ago and she takes them very seriously.
People are good scientists here! Last night, Friday night at 6 pm, we started our journal club which typically lasts two hours with no food attached. Kenzi Saito (grad student) presented a Nat. Neurosci. paper about the delta GABA receptor and its possible involvement in catamenial epilepsy. Very interesting, and we went though it for two hours, half english half Japanese. It's a good way to learn some more Japanese! I could ask why and how many, haha.
Staining is going well, I had some nice donut looking boutons last night and had just finished high K stimulation when the prep mysteriously died after the earthquake. I'll try again after Atsuko takes me with her to the catfood store where I will acquire some sort of pet to love. Maybe a bug or a beta. There is a wild cat that sleeps under a car by my apartment at night but it doesn't speak english.
I got home last night in time to catch the end of Star Wars episode I. Yoda can speak Japanese!

Janel

Home-stay family and I at Inoshima Aquarium

Janel attempting to paint Kanji

This was cultural night at Sokendai. I was supposed to paint the Kanji for "beauty", but the woman teaching us couldn't take it very long and she grabbed the bottom of the brush and helped me out. There is a certain order in which you are supposed to make the strokes, and Japanese people cringe every time I try to write. Why? An a is an a no matter how you write it!

A bathroom at Sokendai University

This is the first bathroom I saw with toilet controls. Amazing invention. I have a close-up of the toilet controls but I'm not going to post it tonight.

Graveyard in Narita

This is one picture from a beautiful gravesite behind the hotel we stayed in the first night in Japan (Narita). This is a child's grave, and you can see they put little bibs on each statue.

First day in Japan (Narita)

Getting off the plane I found Alana and James who I remembered from D.C., and Luke who I didn't remember. We went as a pack through customs where they asked me if I had anything to declare and that sounded pretty funny to me. They let me through even though I was laughing at them. James is a chemist who has an interesting project involving some odd drugs but he advised me to lay off talking about drugs until we passed customs so I also have him to thank for making it into Japan successfully. We found the bus platforms okay but Alana and I figured we should get some money exchanged as the guys mentioned we may need to pay rent up front before we were able to get money from the P.I. This was experience number one trying to accomplish something through a language barrier. The old man helping out in the exchange line was very patient though and after putting names and numbers on the wrong lines a few times we managed to get some yen. The bus ride to the hotel was only about 20 min, but it was awesome staring out the window and seeing a car pass with nobody in the driver's seat. Hehe. And driving in the wrong lane is fun. And looking at road signs in Japanese is fun. There were quite a few people from D.C. on the bus and a bunch of them remembered "banana wa." My favorite Japanese word I used in all of our practice sentances in D.C. There were also the people from Germany, Canada and all over Europe mixed in that were not in D.C. so the half-hour intros went on. Who are you, where are you from, what are you studying, where are you going in Japan, what will you study in Japan....

The hotel was nice. Fascinating energy conservation system where you have to insert your room key into a slot on the wall to get any power in the room. It was great to have a shower after who knows when I had one last hehe. I sent one suitcase on to Gunma and headed to the restaurant for scary meal number one. The looks of the fish were disturbing, eyeballs and skin and all, so I skipped that in favor of the french fries but tried a bit of just about everything else including jellyfish. The jellyfish tasted like a radish so I'm thinking it might not have been a jellyfish. I was just about to put some odd hole-y looking vegetable looking thing in my mouth while asking the guy across from me what he thought is was, and he answered back that it was some sort of intestine, probably cow... and I didn't follow through on that bite. I can't do cow intestine, I just can't. I went over to talk to the German people for a while and Dane-like-the-dog finally figured out the pronounciation of my name and I discovered I was Janel-like-the-bag. I don't know about any Janel bags, but I guess that was a better fit than Janel-like-the-perfume. Fun people. I kept my eyeballs pried open until 9pm as that was the advice for escaping jetlag, and it worked pretty well and I didn't come to life until 5:30 the next morning. Breakfast was pretty good with eggs and toast, and a few of us went out exploring after breakfast as the bus to Sokendai didn't leave until 9am. That's when we found the graveyard back in the forest. So beautiful! There were a lot of gifts left by the graves, and one of the girls knew quite a bit of Japanese language and culture and explained what a lot of the different monuments and writings meant. I didn't see any monkies, but I did see a Japanese earthworm. It just looked like an earthworm. After that we were all off to Sokendai on gigantic buses and the guy I sat next to from France didn't seem too talkative so I studied Japanese on the way there. It was about a 2 hour trip, so we stopped half way at a rest stop where I successfully acquired a coke from a vending machine and spent the rest of the way trying to read the ingrediants that were listed in katakana. It's not too hard an alphabet when you have someone to explain the modifiers and what-not, and I sat next to a very patient guy who didn't seem to mind poring over coke ingrediants for an hour. Fun stuff!!!!

The long long plane ride

Well the first thing I did on the plane was notice how huge it was and then fall asleep again. I think there were 12 seats across. I sat next to an old Chinese man who also fell asleep a lot and sometimes fell over on my shoulder, but whatever. He seemed nice. I woke up about 2 hours into the flight and looked out the window expecting to see ocean, but it was land still! The cool T.V. showed the flight path as going up along CA and over Alaska before hitting water so I was glad to see that I was still on the right flight. One of the flight attendents then brought me an incredible plate of food that was so incredible I just stared at it wondering how much I was supposed to pay for it. But the old Chinese man knew what was going on and put my table down for me as I guess he figured I didn't know how it worked. The food was a big bowl of noodle something, soup, salad, fruit, sushi and dessert. I'm used to a microscopic bag of pretzels so I was understandably confused. It was good and I lost some of my fear of Japanese food. People came by every couple of hours with more food and eventually the stewardess just filled up my water bottle for me instread of making repeated trips for a glass of water. I think I drank a liter on the flight over.

It was cool seeing Alaska, Brie and Christy, I have pictures you have to I.D.! It looked like a bunch of weird mudpits. We hit water then and there wasn't much to see. Hitch and Million Dollar Baby were playing so I wasted 4 hours watching them. Million Dollar Baby is disturbing creepy and sad, and Hitch is funny but the girl was very annoying. The cute story was the fat guy and the actress, what-her-name's issues were boring. There's Janel's movie review for you. I hope Star Wars is on for the trip back. The only other thing that was interesting in the flight was coming out of the bathroom and some tall old guy was standing by the door and told me that I wasn't so tall. That came out of nowhere and I had to wonder about it for a while. When we were getting off the plane he said hello again so I asked him why he said that and he said it was because he had tall daughtersand was good at guessing height. Interesting. To each his own.

Flying into Japan was awesome. My face was cracking from smiling so much. The land is so different, even from way up in the air I could see the rice fields. I have pictures, but uploading them onto this computer is too difficult. When we landed I finally talked to the Chinese man (we were both awake at the same time for once) and he told me he created gems and sold them all over the world, then he gave me his businesscard. Well I had that one all practiced up. I took it with both hands and stared at both sides, told him how nice it was, thanked him over and over again, then had a great next few minutes trying to hold it respectfully with one hand up in the air while I dug around in my very deep backpack with my other arm looking for the little pocket I had stuck my businesscards in. I dug and I dug, but eventually the old man stood up to get his bags and I had to give up in defeat. Sigh.

Catching up... trying to get to Japan

As expected, I spent the night packing. I finished everything in time to load the car and leave, but at the end of the road realized I had forgotton my pillow. Annette drove like the wind and we got the pillow and flagged down the bus as it was leaving the Harmony stop. Then I couldn't remember where my plane ticket was as I was getting on the bus, and ran back to the car to find it stuck in the pages of the phone book I was using to call the bus people. By some great miracle I made it to Denver on time and finally crashed on the plane to wake up coming into L.A. Big airport! Not good for braindead people to walk around loose in! I heard that terminal no. 41 was going to Tokyo-Narita, so I found a chair to wait an hour and realize that in the waiting area I was already the only American. After 45 minutes of waiting and not understanding why class groupings for boarding the airplane were being called in numbers when mine was a letter, I noticed the flight number on the screen was not the same on my ticket. Well drat. Wrong terminal. The lady at the desk pointed to the hallway and said to go left, so I did and got into another line where two guys in the line said that I was in the right line. 15 minutes later I got to the front of the line and a guy looked at my ticket and told me I was in the wrong line and he pointed to the hallway and said to go left. Go left where? Hmm, out of the building and across the street and through security again for Japan airlines. When I got to their front desk I told them I had no idea where to go and was afraid I was going to miss my flight, and she just smiled very calmly and told me that it was okay, I should just go to another hallway she was pointing at and turn left. I was pretty sure that wasn't going to work, but every time I got to a point where I didn't know which way to turn I looked up to see a smiling Japanese angel man laughing and pointing which way to go. He got me to the right line at last and I saw a couple of people from D.C. waiting in the same line. The little angel-man was at the front taking tickets when I got there.

Japan Blog 1

Well this will be an interesting adventure in use of the foreign computer. I can sound out ta-i-to-ru which I believe is title, and I'm feeling pretty smart. It's 11:20pm and I'm waiting for Atsuko, the very friendly tubulin postdoc, to finish working and then she'll take me back to my castle. It's a great place, beautiful wood floors, western toilet, bedroom, bathroom, diningroom and kitchen. There is even a T.V. for watching Japanese soaps, Japanese C-SPAN or the shopping channel. I turn it on when I'm running around in the morning and can catch a sentance to ask Atsuko what it means. It's darn hot in the lab already which makes the aerobics of using the very low lab bench a bit exhausting after a while, but there is great air conditioning in the microscope room where I imagine I will be most of the time. Today Dr.Kuromi showed me how to do high potassium staining and take before and after pictures and analyze them. Finding the same boutons again after stimulation is a bit tricky, but I'm finding the trachea to be useful landmarks. The fly room is awesome here! It would make Laurie cry tears of joy. They have their own fly-mother (Wakai-san) and you must wash your hands before entering. The Japanese larvae look the same as U.S. larvae, I looked closely.
I'm going to attempt to upload a couple of pictures here, however it's slow-going on this computer so I can't do much without crashing it!