Exploring the Quiet City of Tsukuba, Japan Ibaraki

Exploring the Quiet City of Tsukuba, Japan Ibaraki

hey everyone it’s a cold rainy and miserable day and this is my first time in Japan I’m in sucuba Japan and I’m here to visit the University of tukuba I’m working with a couple people on a project I’m here to give a math talk I gave it a few days ago there’s a notion of Independence coming from descriptive set theory that I’m going to argue is better than one that’s often say we we would use because it’s Japan I’m standing in front of the cut and place zoo I promise to find some other crazy things like this I hope they’re nice to the animals but probably not and I need to get to the university now so we have some more to work on with the project I’ll say the the city itself is kind of interesting what the history is and I just want to show everyone around really what’s kind of a smaller place in Japan we’re going to go to Tokyo next but I think this is still interesting here too despite being in Japan you can find some stuff that definitely doesn’t look like it’s Japan and more like what you see on some of my other travels through Eastern Europe so I want to say a little bit about the city because this wasn’t really an organic Al formed City this was entirely planned so in the 1970s it was during the Cold War and the you know Japanese government was worried about what might happen and wanted some sort of backup so this used to be some sort of like swamp lands is my understanding like you know 50 years ago and so they moved a lot of government offices here I think had some sort of ways to escape here in case there were some problems um but then they also started establishing there’s a university of sucuba a lot of companies moved their own research departments over here so it’s a little bit different of a place and it’s it’s about 200,000 people but it really has a small and quiet feel to it we’ll probably go to lunch soon after I get here the people I’m meeting with are actually fans of the channel and have watched I think uh most of my videos but I think they’re a little bit uncomfortable at the moment to actually go around exploring with me and have it recorded so I’m not going to introduce them the video but I’ll be uh having lunch with them right now it’s interesting to see what the bathrooms are like in different places so sometimes it can be a hole in the ground with no way to close a door like in the University I was visiting in keev Ukraine and here it’s something lights just one off back on it’s a bit different here cuz we have one of these magical toilets I’m going to show more of this in my room maybe even in a separate video uh but this is just to me kind of fascinating cuz like it’s like soothing music or something I guess and it’s a ash shower here and all sort of various things so probably the seed is heated as well I guess I am done with everything I’m going to do here for today so I’m going to get going and just on the way out I saw this this is a event we had a few days ago and I gave a talk and a few others the abstract from my talk it’s actually really cool we had a guy from Wuhan China come here and you know of course everybody knows from the uh whole pandemic recently and so we had some good conversations and he invited me to Wuhan so I’ll probably go at some point I don’t know when and also really cool tetsuro Kamai came and he wrote a paper in the 1970s it’s still very influential to a lot of the research I do and some of my colleagues so it was very cool to actually finally meet him in person [Music] I am near tukuba station which kind of seems to be the center of Life uh there’s some places and tall buildings around here and it doesn’t really go all that far but we’re going to look at a couple places around here and everything really closes kind of early I don’t know if there’s any real sort of night life I mean someone let me know in the comments that there is but I haven’t found it uh but pretty much everything from what I can tell closes at 8 or9 there’s a convenience stores that are open a little later uh but there’s some kind of crazy like manga anime thing at least from my perspective that I found in one of the malls up ahead so we’re going to go there first before it [Music] closes I’m now in this humorously named mall called day toown and there’s some kind of cool stuff here like there’s this mang anime store that just kind of reminds me of what some you know nerdy American guys uh tend to be into and we have this thing here that’s a video surveillance do not touch the net and I actually just saw some little kid playing with a net so there’s also some kind of cool arcade down and uh we’ll go check that out and I got to actually be a little careful because they already yelled at me once for recording a couple days ago in here just uh so I’m going to be a little little quiet [Music] there’s all kinds of trading cards here I don’t know what this is for and there’s a bunch of people playing some games with them over there I [Music] think oh this is something I can say that I really like you go Dragon Ball Dragon Ball Z got a Goku and Vegeta fighting each other around the boo [Music] [Applause] Saga well at least you’re stronger than your son was against cell Dragon Ball super which I never saw but I’m sure they have everything here not sure if this is the Bashon a and for those who don’t know what that is probably best not to ask and I think we just got like manga here as far as the I can see there’s just a whole bunch of different aisles of this stuff I didn’t think I would actually find this but I think this is the thing about the tentacles that I’ve heard so much about uh loved by long slimy and I have to say more about this in a minute because I don’t want to say it here I’m going to step outside and explain it long time ago when I was in junior high this is like early mid 90s uh there was a friend of mine and this is before I even heard of the internets you know with the internet of course brings a lot of crazy things um but one of my friends his older brother somehow had like a V VHS tape with all this like weird tentacle erotica and we’re all just like what the hell is this I never watched it but it’s just kind of one of these things that I associated with Japan or at least like you know kind of like nerdy American guys going there looking for something like this and I just kind of thought it was maybe a legend not really real but then it’s like actually there so um yeah I don’t know I’m actually kind of in shock after that tentacle monster I need something Kawaii to get my mind off of it so there are all these sorts of capsule things I just see everywhere this is just actually a pretty small collection I’ve seen some really really big ones they seem to be about like 200 to 500 yen like you you need these like 100 yen coins usually like this one’s 500 whatever it is and what can be more cute and non tentically than a bag dog so this is uh related to the coupon collector problem so they want you to you know they usually want you to collect all of these so if you have like uh say n different things you want to collect and you know you could get repeats because they’re coming at random you know if they’re selected uniformly at random so the formula comes out the expected number of times you need to do it is going to be about like n times the nth harmonic number which is 1 over 1 plus 1 over two plus and so on up to 1 over n which is roughly log n you know with some fudging in there so for five items if you want to get like all five bag dogs you’re going to need to on average check you know buy about 11 or 12 of them and you’re going to get some repeats so let’s see what sort of bag dog we get we’re going to put in this one here I can’t wait to see how this is going to turn out and we got to turn this thing right here and we get this capsule right here so let’s uh sit down and I guess we recycle it here when we’re done got to catch them all got to collect them all thing is a great way for these companies to make money just given how this uh coupon collection problem works out okay so let’s see what happens when we open this okay and we have which bag dog is this that we have it’s uh looks kind of like a ring so it’s like a keychain oh this is like the thing yeah like a fanny pack so it’s a dog and a fanny pack and it comes with a A list of all the other different bag dogs that you can get right here so it’s a pretty good souvenir actually like this is something that’s very clearly from Japan what will gigo be like get into the gaming Oasis and I was here before and there just it’s really kind of eerily empty it’s uh amazing how much stuff is here oh yeah here we go Dragon Ball Z or that’s well not Dragon Ball yeah it is z not like super or gt or something else um it’s just really really empty though like I’m surprised just how much stuff is here yeah this is Kawaii given how few people are actually here at the moment I like the the atmosphere of the place [Music] oh yeah what’s up no photography no filming yes oh okay all right sorry well I guess they lose the free advertisement I was about to show all the various cool stuff there you could play with it kind of doesn’t really make any sense I mean I know it’s kind of common but I remember when I was at the barova market in harke Ukraine you know there was someone who just pulled me in it’s like hey look at everything in my store this is what costs this much this cost this much and it seems to actually be a much smarter business move cuz like they have no idea that I don’t I don’t really have that many subscribers you know maybe I have like two million subscribers and everyone could see like oh this is a cool place to go to so I think I’m G to kind of start heading back in the direction of my apartment there’s a couple things on the way back though [Music] [Music] I think I’m going to end the night with one of the most cyberpunk things I’ve seen in Japan so far at least I’m sure there’s more um the convenience stores are pretty cool like a lot of them are open 24 hours and they may not have fruits and vegetables that often but they do have this section where they’ll have some manga and some like super kawaii stuff and next right next to it is soft core prawn so I’m going to be trying to color grade this now with some sort of cyber Punk look just because like to me nothing’s you know says more like some sort of weird cyberpunk anime than just going to the convenience store anytime of day and being able to buy manga or that [Music] so exactly as I thought I got manga and you got all this so I’m not going to open it up and show what’s in there exactly but I think it’s not too hard to imagine super kawaii good morning this is my last day in sauba and I’m a little late checking out actually so I wanted to show the view from my window there this like rocket thing over there and I think it’s a Expo Center there’s actually a few science museums but I’m told that uh nothing here is too understandable if you don’t know any Japanese so maybe next time I’ll check it out and I just wanted to show a couple things while I’m here um cuz I need to go to Tokyo and I hear some sort of ringing okay as past checkout time I literally have 5 minutes so just really quickly um this doesn’t have the singing stuff unfortunately or the music but you know this it’s heated and like if you if you flush it I guess guess you do wash your hands in that I’m not really sure um the shower is kind of different cuz it looks like you can actually like wash there there’s no shower curtain but water you can actually make the water come down from here which I thought was kind of interesting so I don’t know what that’s for exactly but okay I need to get out quickly so they don’t yell at me I had to really rush out quickly um but the guy I’m working with he brought me to this park which I was out a little bit for Doo park and look at um the markings on this duck I guess it’s just like maybe some local vers I mean this this duck looks more like uh what I’m used to yeah yeah here we go they just kind of started uh swimming around me I don’t have any food for them unfortunately but um but anyways yeah just to kind of get onto the point so there really isn’t that much math to talk about today so there’s a problem I’ve been working on for a while it’s a problem coming from dealing with normal numbers but it’s sort of an algebraic geometry problem and one of the guys like the guy who invited me here on his grant that I’m working with has some ideas and it looks like it’s some significant progress but there’s only really about 20 minutes worth of stuff to explain so just kind of this you know I’ll go to him later and we’ll have lunch and talk about this idea and before I go to the chaos of Tokyo this is the large Park of tukuba and it’s really it’s really pretty relaxing and I mean one of the things that I really like here just as an American I guess this is uh someone tell me if I’m right or not it’s bamboo I guess it’s uh you know we don’t really have this and the the us or in Poland but yeah the Ducks aren’t really that aggressive I don’t think so I think it’s just going to be a little uh walk around the park you know just kind of get the Mind ready to do a little bit more math and I want to look at just kind of some of the local houses and architecture and then we’re just going to head back to the university it’s a little shocking to me that just a couple days ago it was shorts weather and I would have wearn shorts if I brought any and now it’s it’s it’s literally snowing I think this is H kind of cute is this Kawaii or not Google translate says that this says beware of bees they really kind of I guess they didn’t put like a cute smiley face and they just really emphasize the Stinger right there I found a corner of this park I really like now we’re going to start with some minor stuff seen this other places as well but I’m kind of only imagine we’ve got pocari sweat um that sounds absolutely disgusting and I’m trying to think how they actually like bottle is that human sweat so are they uh people jogging around the track and they collect the sweat and put this in this vending machine can anyone tell me what the process of this is um but there’s more so one of the things you know I like um really do actually like about Japan is it does not seem like a pay to p/p in the bushes sort of country they have free bathrooms and and free water this is actually one of the things I really like about the US I’m not really sure how this works but uh I’m just going to kind of stand back a little bit cuz we got to be careful o my camera is not waterproof so we got to be careful about that so let’s go in the free bathrooms I remember in the key Zoo doing this and wondering what we would find do we think that the bathroom is going to be any better than in the KE zooo so I don’t think anyone’s in here check beforehand um okay like kind of standard stuff there there is at least soap there’s no soap in the KE zooo and what are we going to find here we found little Ukraine in this beautiful Japanese Park uh well no no no it’s better than that because there is toilet paper at least so that’s a plus but Google translate says something about not flushing here so if anyone can explain to me uh what the deal with that is but it is it’s a little little cleaner at least sometimes it really pays off to look at the details and this vending machine there’s a lot of these uh sori Boss Coffee coffee Boss Coffee boss centu boss is the boss of the mall since 1992 so I I hate comparing Japan to Ukraine cuz they’re totally different types of places but um if someone were to just give me those words and say okay where in the world did you find that my first place to guess would not be in Japan it would not be in China it would be in some weird Metro station kind of off the center and either like harke or ke or something like that like at some uh kiosk so it just kind of warms my heart seeing that sort of thing [Music] such a cutesy thing right here I have a little ear muffs over it it’s a but wa what’s this actually for I’m not totally clear that’s from M and this looks like a clothing store so I would thought this is in the west that that’s like a restaurant where you eat those cute animals but then here it’s like clothing store maybe it’s I don’t know I have no idea yeah the vibe I’m getting in this place is it’s more uh you know just like people have their backyards like look at that I don’t know what that is some kind of cool uh green thing that they’re growing in the back you know in uh pool and you know we have these uh big apartment buildings and you know if you go east even more so and to be honest I actually kind of like that I like the high population density things are very close very walkable still have a few minutes to wait for my bus just kind of look at some of the sort of houses people are living in here and just kind of my thoughts on the city since I’m leaving it soon I’ve been here for a little bit over a week um you know as it was put is kind of a nice quiet place to sit and do math and there’s some benefits to that like I know some of the univers ities in the US or some really really tiny little Villages almost with nothing for 2 hours and for me this is a terrible place to do math cuz I go absolutely crazy I feel like like there’s no one around and you know I I need some energy and excitement and this kind of seems like an in between place like it’s totally different than Denton Texas I did a post talk at University of North Texas um but it’s still like kind of a similar size and it’s also you have some time you can get to a big city but it’s still very timec consuming to get there and I did get a lot done when I was in Texas actually like I you know wrote several papers was able to work hard but at the same time there’s also ways that I was unhappy and I kind of wonder if this might even be a similar sort of thing that yeah if you have some people here that are good to sit and work with maybe you can get a lot done but I think if I were here for you know too too long I would like you know long for the excitement and energy of Tokyo or some other sort of place [Music] well this explanation is clear I hope you yeah yeah we were just doing this for a while so there’s still some more work to be done have to head to Tokyo now this is the end of my stay in sukua I’m actually not in sucuba anymore Professor akiyama took me to a neighboring town I’m not even sure he told me the name but I not really entirely sure all I know is that I am at the arakawa oi station or I think that’s roughly how it’s pronounced um and I’m on my way to Tokyo so there’s a little bit of downtime um I’m going to be going to Sendai to to hoko University to talk to some people there and speak at the logic seminar but there’s a few days where there’s like a holiday now and people are grading papers and everything so um there’s another interesting thing that he told me about um kubas that apparently there’s just a ton of people who have phds you just kind of meet everyone everywhere and there’s just people with phds constantly so um as well as the schools are apparently of a very high standard and the teachers have to deal with very competitive parents all the time so it’s just kind of a little bit of an unusual place so anyways I thought it was kind of interesting it was my uh you know first destination in Japan so I’m out I’m sure there’s going to be tons of crazy things to do in Tokyo I’m not not entirely sure what yet but stick around and like comment subscribe all this sort of stuff and hit the Bell notification to see what I’m up to and I have uh to figure out now how to actually get to Tokyo and check into my hotel

I spent more than a week in the city of Tsukuba つくば市 Japan at the University of Tsukuba. This was my first time in Japan and the beginning of a six city mega tour across Japan (including Tokyo, Sendai, Kyoto, Nagoya, and Hiroshima). Tsukuba has only around 200,000 people as in Ibaraki prefecture 茨城県. I was in town to work on a couple math papers with some colleagues of mine at University of Tsukuba and to speak at the number theory seminar there. I had a very nice experience and got to explore this sleepy, but very interesting city close to Tokyo.

#tsukuba #ibaraki #japantravel