Author Archives: ems5311

Japan and energy efficiency

Today I was reading the news and came across this article:

http://www.tv-asahi.co.jp/ann/news/web/html/201213037.html

What’s going on in it is Daihatsu, a car company here that doesn’t sell in the US and produces mainly small cars (軽自動車 they call them) has developed what is to date the highest fuel efficiency gasoline only (non-hybrid) car. This is going to be released at the beginning of next year.  At the end of the article they mention that Daihatsu is in fierce competition with Mazda to develop the highest fuel efficiency vehicle.  They’re both shooting for over 30 km/liter, which is about 70 mpg.

This struck me as yet another thing you’ll never see in the US.  At first I thought it might be because there are tax incentives to these companies to do this, but while this may be the case, I think that’s certainly not the only reason.  The Japanese are very big on resource and environmental preservation.  A few examples are how the toilets have two flush mechanisms, one for “大” or big, and one for “小”, or small.  At first I thought this was so trivial that it’s no wonder toilets elsewhere in the world don’t implement it, but if you think after thousands of flushes per day, the water saved will add up.

I also remembered that a few weeks ago my professor was telling me about the Japanese take on waste, or 勿体無い (which means wasteful) as they call it.  In every aspect of life this principle seems to be applied; from the fact that there is never, ever any litter on the streets (you could do a scavenger hunt in any metropolitan area in this country looking for litter, it would take hours to find any), to how you’re always expected to eat all of your food and never throw any out.  The second part isn’t a big deal because food is both extremely expensive and the portions are tiny.

Just another small thing that sets Japan apart from the rest of the world.


Location: 仙台市宮城県

日記の作文

Hey everyone, it’s been a while,

Writing here from my dorm in 仙台市宮城県 (Sendai), chilling out at the end of another cold day in northern Japan. Somebody told me that it was supposed to snow this week, but it never ended up happening, well whatever. This Saturday I’m running in the 電子工学科競走, (well that’s what I’m assuming it’s called anyway, it’s a race between electrical engineering lab research members). We’ll see how hilariously bad I’ll do in that one, I’ll keep you posted.

Been keeping pretty busy lately with what I do best, which is studying. Got a pretty good grasp of 500+ 漢字 (kanji) by now (writing and reading, 音読み＋訓読みand irregulars) I think anyway. Just 1500 or so to go. My reading skill is definitely going up, thanks in part to the absolutely ridiculous TV shows in this country that have stylized subtitles for everything. I’m just about getting to the point where I can read children’s comics and simple magazine articles; it’s nice because I can measure the amount of progress I’m making based on how far I’ve gotten into the textbooks I’m using. Hopefully that progress will continue…

Despite this, my listening skill is trailing quite a bit. I do listen to the radio quite a bit, but perhaps a bit more talking with Japanese people and chilling out in the kitchen with my roommates is necessary. I also attend a seminar on semiconductor physics in Japanese, which is certainly tough but I feel like I’m understanding a little bit more each week. The seminar is a good time; the professor is a really cool old guy who has been working in the field for a long time and obviously really knows what he’s doing. He often points out errors that we make in ways that could almost be considered insulting, but since he’s the professor the person getting the criticism just bows and says thank you. We need to always use ます and 敬語 (polite speech) when speaking, but the professor can address us like friends.

Some random thought about Japan:

It’s impossible to find your way around at first because every road looks exactly the same. You need an iPhone or something.

Japanese people are seen as high class and cool if they study English. Every professional can at least read English, but barely any can speak very well. This is what I fear I am turning into but the opposite (able to read and write Japanese, not speak).

Everyone you see in any store, and most public places, will pretend that they absolutely love their job and would not rather be doing anything in the world than their job. Even if it’s completely obvious that they hate it. There are people who stand outside stores holding signs and yelling stuff to attract customers; even if there’s no one on the street they’ll keep standing there, smiling, and yelling the same lines (I saw this from a bit away, nobody else was around). Guys in grocery stores putting stuff on shelves will constantly be yelling いらっしゃいませー (which means “welcome to the store” kind of) over and over again, even if there’s nobody around or nobody is paying attention. Yes it does get annoying.

Clothes are expensive as hell. I think this is the most expensive place in the world to buy clothes. The GAP (yeah, same one) sells jeans for 150 bucks. The same ones you got on sale for 25.

Elevators talk to you. Toilets talk to you.

There’s no whole wheat bread. The only kind of bread they have is sub-wonder bread quality. You can find peanut butter and jelly, but it’s easier to find “peanut cream” with the jelly, which is like jelly consistency but made of what is allegedly peanuts. I bought it exactly once.

Let me branch off and talk about food for a second:

My roommate Wataru (渉) is always eating something weird. One of his favorite foods is natto (納豆) which is known as fermented beans. This stuff is classic for confusing the hell out of anyone who hasn’t been eating it since they were less than a year old. I was at a 回転寿司 (revolving sushi place, google this one they’re real cool) place one time, and my buddy Tim orders this sushi that is just made of natto and a small raw egg. He tells me it’s easily the grossest thing you can get at this place so of course I have to order it for myself. The taste is commonly described by people as tasting like BO; I do not disagree with this but I think it’s not entirely the taste that makes eating it such an unpleasant experience. It’s the fact that you can’t swallow it immediately and get it over with; the natto is real thick and you have to chew it and swallow it in bits, so the weird flavor hangs with you for a while, and then there’s still an aftertaste. And this sushi was compounded with a raw quail egg that congealed everything together and made the texture even less pleasant. Natto is the grossest food and provides the most fun you can have at a sushi place. Also it’s really, really good for you, it’s pretty much pure protein.

Another thing Wataru eats a lot he calls 焼き鳥 (yakitori), and I call it cat food. I call it cat food because it both comes in a small tin can and when you open it it looks and smells like cat food. You eat it cold, with chopsticks, straight out of the tin. I tried it and it’s pretty good, just tastes like real salty chicken. Like what cat food tastes like, probably. Wataru told me it’s only like 70 yen a can, so I’m definitely picking some of that stuff up next time I go to the スーパ.

Rice cookers are awesome. This country has redefined bachelor food, I swear. You can make a meal by moving you hand like three times (put rice in cooker, put water in cooker, put this other stuff in the cooker, then turn it on). カレーライス I eat a lot, which is like rice with this brown stuff you put on it. It’s decent, and only like 50 yen for a meal that basically fills you up.

There are convenience stores everywhere. There are vending machines everywhere. They sell computers in convenience stores (yes I’m being serious). Yet to see one in a vending machine though.

There’s a lot of bicycle traffic, I’ve almost seen bike traffic jams. The place is set up pretty well to prevent that from happening though. You can get anywhere in town faster on a bike than in a car, every time.

That’s about all I can think of for now. I’ll throw up some pictures soon, but I’m way lazy and barely ever take any. Oh and finally here’s the speech I wrote and read at this speech forum thing I got talked into doing the other day, yeah it was pretty hilarious. My friend took a video with his phone, if you feel like cringing at my horrible pronunciation and nervousness I’ll put it up.

Until next time,

Erich S.


Location: Sendai, Miyagi, Japan

Working and studying in San Jose

Hi fellas,

I’d consider this my first real blog entry for Penn State Geoblogs, so I’ll try to keep it not too boring while fitting as much info in here as possible.  At this moment I’m in my cubicle in Cisco SJC Building 22, ARTG building.  Don’t worry, I’ve finished all my work for the day and just like hanging out here.  It’s a pretty nice cubicle, what can I say?  I moved out to San Jose about 2 weeks ago, and things have been going pretty smoothly since, despite the fact that neither myself nor my roommate own a car.  We both bike around a lot; bike to work, bike to pick up groceries and supplies, it takes some effort but it always works out.  It’s also a great way of seeing the area.

Airplane window view, flyin’ in.

Obelisk outside my apartment

Rivermark shopping area

Oh, I suppose I should talk a bit about why I’m out here.  I am an intern at Cisco Systems, which is a network company.  They (we?) build from the ground up (hardware to software) and maintain network devices, mainly selling to the business/enterprise market but also to residential.  Take a look at your router sometime or the ones you see in the store, most of them are made by Cisco or Linksys, which is also Cisco (Linksys by Cisco I think it’s called now).  The group that I am working in is called ARTG (Advanced Routing Technology Group) and my particular team, which consists of just 12 guys myself included, in this group is working on VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) systems.  In other words, we play around with phones.  More accurately, the stuff that connects your phone to the phone (or phones) you’re trying to call.  These first few weeks my team has been nice enough to just give me time to get acclimated to the working environment and hasn’t been demanding too much productivity out of me, and I’ve been trying to pick up as much knowledge as I can about the systems.  It’s a little intimidating at times, but incredibly interesting and I am amazed and endlessly impressed by the skill and technical expertise of the people I work with.

The size and scale of Silicon Valley is truly astounding.  Cisco alone consists of 60 buildings (and is about the same geographical area as my hometown, State College), and I live within sight of Samsung, Cisco, Canon, and within close walking distance to Sun Microsystems HQ (though it’s now Oracle).  I often try to take the time to look around and consider what a wonderful opportunity this is for a lowly aspiring code monkey like myself to be given.

Outside Sun (Oracle)

Some Cisco CEO’s Ferarri outside building 6.

Cisco building C

At the same time, however, I’m trying very hard to gear up as much as possible to make that big trip over the Pacific to 東邦大学 (Tohoku University) in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture.  I’ve been studying the language in what free time I can find out here; after completing Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji Part 1 (finished before I got out here, which was awesome!) I am now much more confident in my venture to learn to read, and eventually speak.  If you are unfamiliar with that series, I definitely recommend checking it out.  Those crazy 漢字 seem a lot less intimidating when you’re close friends with 2048 of them.  Being able to write and knowing what they mean makes learning their readings and general sentence structure much more fun; currently I’m working on the smart.fm Core 2000 series and 2001 Kanji Odyssey, in addition to looking through comics and websites and with the help of god-like Anki every inch of the way.  I think in these past two weeks I’ve put on 250+ words to my vocabulary, which is an okay rate as far as I’m concerned, would definitely like to start putting in more from here on out.

I really do love the way the kanji work together to form words.  When by themselves they’ll mean one thing, but when multiple are put together they’ll turn into something different (sometimes completely different), but still logical.  For example:

本屋（ほにや） means book store.  本 + 屋 = book + roof.

上手（じょうず） means skilled.  上 + 手 = above + hand.

And I could go on and on, but you get the idea.  I was thinking about pressing on to RTK2 to learn the readings of the kanji, but learning them in context with sentences, or just by SRSing words seems a lot more fun and seems to be working so far.  I am also just starting to be able to guess at the readings of some compound kanji words just from prior experience with other ones; it’s pretty cool!  For example I figured out the correct reading of 人口問題 (じんこうもんだい) after a minute of staring thanks to knowing the readings of 人 just because it’s so common, 口 because of 火口 (かこう), 問 thanks to 質問 (しつもん), which I love because it looks like two faces next to each other, and 題 because of宿題.  Of course when all was said and done I still had to look the thing up because I have no idea what jinkoumondai means!  But you get the idea, and it means population problem, in case you care.

Though I do wish I had more time to study 日本語, because it really is a lot of fun, I do not regret working out here at all.  To anyone who is starting out in the CSE/IST related fields, I would definitely recommend checking out Cisco.  The internship is incredibly well run and organized, and the working environment is just awesome.  In just two weeks I’ve learned so much stuff that would have been pretty much impossible to learn otherwise, and I hope to continue doing so for the rest of the summer.

If you ever want to talk Japanese study or culture, or computers and tech, hit me up at ems5311 on gmail or google talk.

Take it easy,

Erich S.


Location: Cisco Building 22, San Jose CA

Introductory Post

My name is Erich Stoekl, and as of Spring 2010 I am a sophomore in Computer Engineering at Penn State, University Park.  I am from State College, PA and my dad works at Penn State as well (Allan Stoekl, professor of French and Comparative Literature).  I am also an employee of cisco systems and will be working at their San Jose branch this summer.  Starting October 2010 I will be going to Tohoku University (東北大学), in Sendai Japan, and I will be there until August 2011.  I am going through the Department of Engineering exchange program with Tohoku University, and will be studying computer and electrical engineering.  In addition to this, I have the personal goal of learning the language as much as I can, and seeing as much and learning as much about the country as I can.  I will also try to take as many pictures of the areas I see along the way as possible.


Location: State College, PA