Japan -- Oct/Nov 2007

This photo is a view of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) building in the Shinagawa district in Tokyo (the next photo is the same, but with a zoom lens). Both of these photos were taken from my room on the 30th floor (I think that's the floor we were on -- it was pretty high up) of one of the towers of the Prince Hotel, on the opposite side of Shinagawa Station from the MHI building. This hotel had several towers -- at least two of them high rises. Part of Shinagawa Station is near the bottom of this photograph. Most of the photos I took from this hotel room did not turn out especially well, partly because of the reflections off the glass. One of the other buildings in this photo is a Mitsubishi Corporation office building. As mentioned above, John and I learned (the hard way) that Mitsubishi and MHI are not the same thing.

There is an Outback Steakhouse near the MHI building in this complex (we were ready to try "American" food at that point -- although I thought the Japanese food was excellent). Surprisingly (to me), the Outback did not have Australian beer. This was a good thing, however; otherwise I probably would not have tried Asahi (beer), which (I learned) is outstanding (at least the on-draft version is).

I apparently never got a picture of the vending machines on each floor of most of the hotels we stayed at -- they sold cans of beer in addition to cans of soft drinks. I never used any of those machines.

I also did not get a photo of a beer-dispensing machine in the business class lounge at the Osaka airport. It filled a glass using a moving spout-dispenser that was apparently designed to limit the amount of foam in the glass (the spout moved up so it was always about 0.5 inch above the level of the liquid as the glass was filled). There was another American in the lounge watching this machine with me. He said, "Only in Japan."


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