IJET-15, Day 1
Saturday and Sunday were the days of the conference. It was starting at 9:00 AM, so we had to be out the door and heading towards the æ±æ¨ªç·š by about 8:00. Not that this was hard to manage: aside from our circadian rhythms being almost perfectly out of phase with the local time, Tokyo is in the wrong time zone: the sun was up at 4:30 AM, and Bryan’s office gets plenty of light. So we were awake pretty early.
Once at the station, I vaguely recalled that 桜木町 was the stop for the Pacifico, but to my consternation, the Toyoko-sen didn’t stop there anymore–instead it had a stop at ã¿ãªã¨ã¿ã‚‰ã„. Which also sounded like the right area, based on my memory, but not what I expected. Off we went. Turns out that the Toyoko-sen’s route had in fact been diverted recently, and my guess was correct. As Tom explained over lunch (at a wacky little Chinese place), æ±æ€¥ had built backwards from the new station, which is underground, up to the point where the new segment would intersect the old, and in one night after the trains stopped running, ripped up the section of old rail over the juncture, relaid it to connect to the new segment, made a couple of test runs, and continued with service as usual the next morning. Quite an audacious feat of engineering–something that was a recurring observation through this trip.
Gwen was not in on the conference, but would be attending the schmoozefest that night, so she came in to Yokohama with me and lit out on her own. She managed to find her way around well enough.
Sessions attended that day: the opening plenary “state of the industry” session, and on a new publishing venture launched by some of my fellow translators. I checked in on one about translation memory, but wound up leaving that to catch up with friends. Richard Sadowsky observed that when we had first gotten to know each other at a much earlier IJET–perhaps IJET-3 in 富士å‰ç”°(?), he had commented that he and I seemed to be the youngest translators there, but that was no longer true. He’s right: Richard has aged quite a bit since then.
Gwen made her way back to the conference site, and everyone shuffled downstairs to the dinner, a really lavish buffet with free beer and wine. Gwen and I were still kind of looped from jet lag, and made a relatively early departure.