The conference: Kobe 1989
An occasional biographical retrospective
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Perhaps the most embarrassing evening of my life was in July 1989 just outside Tokyo. I was off to IOOC ’89 (natty acronym for the 7th Conference on Integrated Optics and Optical Fibre Communications) in Kobe and was taking the opportunity to visit as many Japanese labs as I could between landing at Narita Airport and flying on to Osaka.
After a day’s chatting to photonic managers and engineers, two chaps took me out for a meal in the company chalet, where I found myself in slippers at a low table talking about Shakespeare while most of my neurons were scrambling to get food to my mouth with chopsticks.
The sheer politeness of my hosts, who had clearly boned up on the Bard, only made it worse. I’d studied (if that’s the word) The Merchant of Venice for O level and had been to the Shakespeare experience a few times in Stratford-upon-Avon, but beyond snatches of soliloquy – To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub: – I harboured no delusions of adequacy.
We stumbled through the evening, stumbling being the operative verb because with two artificial legs, I couldn’t reach my feet. They had to help me off with my shoes and on with the indoor footwear – presumably the most humiliating thing they could have been asked to do. I kept almost sliding out of the slippers (clue in the name) as I climbed the stairs to dinner and down again, afterwards. Fortunately, I had legroom because the table straddled a footwell with them on one side and me on the other.
Later, they cheerfully put me in a taxi for the trip home. I wasn’t clear who was paying and as I watched the oncoming traffic spilling out of the capital, I was frantically converting Yen into Sterling as the meter clicked. I kept wondering whether I’d have the cash to cover it, and then how I’d get my expenses signed-off back at base. On exit, I discovered I wasn’t allowed to pay, so I waved the driver off with a swell of relief and walked past reception to the lifts at – I think – the Shinagawa Prince Hotel.
I can’t remember much about the conference where I’d been invited to speak on simulation and optical waveguides. Invited papers were a collusion between organising committees who wanted international speakers and researchers who needed a reason their management should shell out for a ticket and a week or two of expenses. My star had risen over the past few years because of a simulation suite we’d built with an electromagnetics modelling group in Stafford, and these invitations were becoming a regular occurrence.
To get there I needed signed approval and duly found myself in the Deputy Director’s office, proffering a form endorsed by my manager (and probably his). It was the furthest I’d travelled, and I fancied business class for the first time in my life. Company policy was strictly economy, and Owen Joseph had a reputation for financial control.
Still, I thought, if you don’t ask you don’t get. After the usual questions, and as he got ready to sign, I asked whether I could go club. He asked who was paying, so I named the sponsor. ‘Umm’, was all he said before signing and making a note, if not with a flourish at least with his fountain pen, to upgrade me.
Two weeks later, he announced his retirement and I realised the powerful ambiguity of being about to leave. I should have asked for first.
I also fancied the bubble of the 747 but when I was belted in a cabin crew chappie leaned across to tell me I wasn’t allowed upstairs on crutches, so I lost my window seat with that lovely shelf-cum-storage space next to it and had to head down the spiral staircase to an aisle seat which was supposed to keep me safer. Unfortunately, we didn’t crash so I never discovered whether my chances of survival were enhanced on the lower deck. (I did ride in the bubble much later with a less eagle-eyed crew. It was always thus: the indeterminacy of rules.)
The ticket really paid off later. Outbound had been direct, but the journey home was Osaka to Tokyo, Tokyo to Alaska and then back to London. Two engineers from a neighbouring research centre were on my flight but had no guardian angel to keep them out of steerage. I didn’t think I slept much because a pair of sleepless children played hopscotch all night but my mates looked more wrecked at each stopover and by Heathrow I realised I was in great shape next to them.
Back to the hotel: I bumped into someone whom I knew through the opto-research network across Europe. He was also visiting labs, and his guardian angels had given him sheets in English on one side with Japanese on the other giving detailed directions from the hotel to every destination. Apparently, the Japanese text allowed you to give it to a native reader, since it explained that you were lost and could they point you in the right direction. He asked me where I was going and went through his pack, pulled out all my visits and then got reception to photocopy them.
When the hotel shuttle dropped me down to Shinagawa station the next morning, I had one of the scariest moments of my life, since I couldn’t read anything anywhere. First, a tight desolation as panic kicked in and then I realised, as the adrenaline ebbed, that this is what it must be like to be illiterate.
It was a teachable moment.
Gradually, as I took in my surroundings, a few small signs in English peeked out at me, including one that said, tickets. I used the automated vending system (cash not cards) and armed with my magic scroll, I followed my instructions out into the suburbs where there was absolutely nothing in English. However, there was usually an anxious face waiting, ready to host yet another European on the Tokyo Express.
I liked the trains, first some sort of circle route and then a branch line to a suburb. They were full but not rammed and I didn’t encounter the famous pushers who shoved commuters in at the stations. Being taller than the average citizen, the air conditioning hit me in the face until the carriages emptied and I could watch the countryside. At one station two elderly ladies were taking their leave of one another, bowing back and forth. They weren’t quite synched and every time one of them tried to turn and go, the other would trigger a fresh round of delicate bobbing. A lesson in asynchronous feedback…
Some visits were more like a production line. One day, it started with Mr Matsushita’s first bicycle lamp and featured a soundproofed room to listen to National Panasonic’s latest PA systems (while our guide stood outside, turning the wick up and then down again). At others, I gave talks to roomfuls of weary managers and engineers corralled for the occasion, before toddling around a lab.
One morning, of course, one of those worried faces was probably deeply relieved to pack me into a taxi 12 hours later for the cab ride home. Who knows, maybe he’s written it up, too, in his Substack or whatever.