I started writing this post in 2013 after getting back from giving a talk on some work I did in collaboration with Randolph Voorhies at IROS 2013 in Tokyo. My initial plans to keep up a regular blog quickly went to the wayside, however, as I became busier with my PhD. This is written as a bit of a stream of conciousness retrospective.

The title of this post is in reference to the absolute abundance of trash cans in the United States compared to Japan. It was one of the first things I noticed - no trash, and no place to put trash.

The day of my flight to the conference, I was minutes too late to avoid a lockdown at LAX, and couldn’t take a flight until a day later. Rand had arrived earlier in the day and was able to depart. Two other members of my lab were also presenting work at the conference.

My talk was on the first of two papers centered around performing frame-to-frame registration and mapping with the Velodyne HDL-32e, a spinning LIDAR sensor. IROS slotted us in a numerical optimization session, which I thought was an odd place to put our work. It was still a great experience - my second academic conference after attending ICIP the year prior (at Disneyworld of all places). There was a large exhibition hall set up with all kinds of actual robots, including full-on assembly lines.

Since IROS took place in Tokyo, Rand and I used this as an opportunity to visit several other places in Japan, including Osaka, Koyasan (Mt. Koya), and Kyoto. I had started studying Japanese about a month before the trip, and had three instances where it actually came in handy:

1. I locked my wallet in the hotel safe and used a guide book and horribly broken Japanese to get some help (something about my room’s bank).
2. I was reading my Genki book on the train and an Obaasan gave us some umeboshi flavored candy - still to this day some of the best candy I’ve ever tasted.
3. When walking around in Kyoto, a group of elementray school kids came up to us to practice their English. After a while they asked if Japanese was OK, and asked our age. I responded in Japanese (I was ready for this and maybe “that is a pen”) and they ran away excited about the interaction.
   
   The trip inspired me to study Japanese while at USC, which I did for several few years. I would return to Japan in 2018 after graduating, and plan on making another trip in the future.