rick@cs.arizona.edu (Rick Schlichting) (06/11/91)
Richard D. Schlichting (rick@cs.arizona.edu)
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 86721, USA
[This report represents the personal opinion of the author, who was on
sabbatical in Japan from Dec. 1989 through July 1990. The sabbatical
was supported in part by grant INT-8910818 from the NSF U.S.-Japan
Cooperative Science Program.]
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On Tuesday, I woke early and ate breakfast at the hotel
coffee shop. It was a buffet spread, in fact, the same things as
I remember from my previous trip to Hiroshima 2 years before.
I then packed up, checked out, and waited for the arrival of
my host, Prof. Tadao Ichikawa, a professor at Hiroshima University
whose specialty is visual programming. The schedule was for him
to pick me up at 9am for a visit to the famous shrine at Miyajima,
and then to go to the university in the afternoon. He arrived a
little after 9am, but informed me that, unfortunately, he was leaving
for the U.S. in a couple of days and, quite understandably, couldn't
really spare the time for the morning sightseeing. I was happy
to go by myself, but it turned out that he had arranged for
his assistant Mrs. Tanimoto to take me instead.
Following sightseeing and lunch, we drove to Ichikawa's lab
at Hiroshima University, a journey that took a little over an hour.
The particular campus where his lab is located is a new one that is
situated quite far (35 kilometers) from Hiroshima proper. I found
out later that there also have another campus downtown, but that
all departments are scheduled to move, with the new buildings
actually being financed by the sale of the old ones in the city.
The actual building where Ichikawa's office is located is about
8 years old.
We were a bit late for my presentation, so Ichikawa postponed it for
15 minutes to allow me to rest. After my talk, we went to Ichikawa's
office to chat for awhile. It turned out to be a very interesting
time, since he has a number of very interesting opinions about Japan
and the Japanese educational system. Indeed, he has written a book of
non-academic essays called VIVA Nippon!? containing observations
on different aspects of Japanese life (it was translated from a Japanese
version published a couple of years ago.) I only glanced at it, but it
looked very interesting (and entertaining), so I made a mental note
to get a copy. He also gave me a copy of a report based on a talk
made at the annual ACM conference this year that criticized the Japanese
educational system (in a hilarious way.) He also made the following
points in our discussion:
-- Running conferences is very expensive in Japan compared to
other countries since, for example, the hotels charge quite
a lot to rent conference rooms, etc. This makes getting
corporate support mandatory, although they are reluctant
to contribute financially unless the meeting is sponsored
by a purely Japanese professional organization.
-- Many Japanese computer science results don't make it into
international journals. In his opinion, the primary reason for
this is that there are essentially no rewards built into the
Japanese professional system to encourage researchers to be
international in outlook. This, combined with the fact that
it's more difficult to prepare a paper for this journal, means
that most results get published only in Japanese journals or
conferences.
In between various conversations, he had his associates demonstrate
a couple of the visual systems that had been constructed in the lab.
One was a visual programming system oriented around the use of Icons
to represent real-world artifacts. Combining and overlapping the Icons
were then interpreted as a program that depended on the semantics of the
objects; the user was given various choices to select for right way to do
the interpretation. The other was a system called IconicBrowser, which is
a browsing front end to a object-oriented database system. Using it, an
individual could, for example, retrieve various types of information
(including digitized pictures) about all (say) CD players that meet certain
defined specs (e.g., price, size). The system runs on two Tandy PCs
with the front end on one, and the actual database on another. It was
impressively fast I thought, given the hardware limitations, the
use of the network, and the transmission of digitized pictures. To
a novice like me, both systems seemed very impressive.
While Ichikawa, I and various colleagues were conversing, his
poor assistant was trying to find us a place where we could get
a quick bite to eat before I left on the train to Hiroshima station.
The major problem was that it had to be relatively early (~4.30pm) to
get me to the airport in time to catch my plane back to Tokyo. After
a few attempts, she found us a place in Seijo, close by. Ichikawa
was extremely apologetic about the place before we went, claiming
it was primarily a drinking place. I had visions of some dark,
dingy, smoke-filled bar, but it turned out to be a very nice
and quaint restaurant with small, individual rooms containing
tables and chairs. We were joined by Ito-san, a technical staff
member in his lab who had received his education at a vocational
type school. (As far as I can recall, he's the first such person
I've seen.) While we ate, we continued our previous conversations.
Following dinner, Ichikawa dropped me off at the Seijo train station,
where Ito-san helped me get on the right train. From Hiroshima
station, I took a taxi to Hiroshima airport, where I arrived in plenty
of time to catch my plane.
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Prof. Tadao Ichikawa
Information Systems Faculty of Engineering
Hiroshima University
Shitami, Saijo-cho
Higashi-Hiroshima 724
Japan