A Few Notes about Technology...

I’m wondering if it has something to do with being in smaller coastal cities, so time will tell… The principal at Kamaisha Elementary said they have 38 computers in their school, and then kids have a technology class once a week. The classrooms were not equipped with interactive white boards. I haven't seen a child on a computer yet. This is a significant difference between the schools I have seen and ours in the United States. 

The hotel rooms do not all have wifi Internet access. I’ve been to enough conferences and different countries that I remembered my long blue cord. Phew! However, the lights in each room are still connected to the room key, which I think is quite smart and high-tech. I've seen these in several different countries, though not as much in the us. This one made me laugh, as there is an actual room "key" attached. 

I really haven’t seen clocks hanging anywhere. Fortunately, the beds in each hotel have a clock in the headboard of the bed, along with a radio. It looks pretty outdated, to be honest, but is pretty great, as I've been waking up throughout the night with a bit of jet lag. 

There have been flat-screen televisions in each room. My current room has a little hot plate built into the desk for boiling water for tea. It doesn’t turn on without the metal pot on it- I tried!

Elevators… I have been squished in the doors of the elevators about 10 times already. They close very quickly, and don’t have sensors quite like ours. Japanese people must be very fast movers!

I’ve seen a few kids with something like a Nintendo DS system. A few have telephones. I’ve seen iphones and a few other smartphones too. Everyone, young and old, has trinkets hanging off their phones here. 

The toilets are pretty complicated here. Each of them “turns on” when you sit. There is a control panel on the side of the toilet that looks a lot like the panel of a massage chair or a seat on an airplane. One of the buttons makes a flushing sound, though there is no flush that occurs when you press it. Another button plays music. There are buttons for the bidet, and I’m not quite sure what the rest of them do. I debated on trying, but I’m not usually the luckiest person on Earth, so I decided to leave them alone! I once heard Ian Jukes (Director of the International 21st Century Fluency Project) talk about "toilets of the future" at a conference. He said they would be connected to your refrigerator, would analyze and measure your "output", and then your refrigerator would communicate the required "input" you should have. This must already be available somewhere in Japan!