Japan -- Oct/Nov 2007

This photo shows a poster on the wall of a Kobe subway station. This poster is for Kobe's professional (rugby) football team, the Steelers. It is named for much the same reason as the Pittsburgh Steelers -- Kobe was the historical center of Japan's steel industry. The team name is near the right-hand side of the poster, about 2/3 of the way down.

This photo was taken after my second train trip to Kobe (I think -- it's starting to get fuzzy in my memory, and with those long hours, some of this trip was probably fuzzy from the get go).

You might notice there are no photos of the MHI building in Kobe -- the building where the nuclear reactor design/analysis people who are sited there work. It was in a shipyard (where I couldn't take a camera -- or at least I didn't feel comfortable taking one onto a customer's property). Also, it was some distance from the entrance of the shipyard to that particular office building, so I wouldn't have been able to stand outside the gate photograph the building. Apparently the shipyard was one of MHI's original businesses in Kobe. As they added product lines, they built facilites for their other businesses on this land they already owned.

The office workers in the "nuclear" building in Kobe dressed somewhat differently at work than those in the MHI offices in Tokyo. At the shipyard, they generally wore the same types of powder blue uniforms that the shipyard workers wore (even the nuclear vice president wore a uniform). They seemed to have change rooms, where they put on these uniforms after arriving at work in the morning -- we didn't' seen anyone in uniform on the Kobe subway trains when traveling to or from the shipyard. (In Tokyo, they all wore black business suits. I noticed one of the waitresses at the company dining room in Tokyo coming into the building in a black business suit. She apparently changed into her waitress uniform after reporing to work.)

There was a little museum or visitor center in the building in Kobe. It had displays of various MHI products (including an interesting robot who would move in response to voice commands -- IF you spoke to it in Japanese). This visitor center also had a large photo on one wall showing what the shipyard looked like in October 1945 -- basically a flat wasteland after the bombings. I think this visitor center was intended primarily for business visitors (such as potential customers), not for the general public.

The MHI engineers and managers we met with impressed me greatly. Part of what we did in these meetings was to go over the documents that WSMS had prepared (in English) sentence-by-sentence. I was amazed that, at several points, the MHI people were able to pick up statements that could potentially be misinterpreted (or that did not accurately describe the analyses that had been performed). In a few instances, they also pointed out some awkward English grammar. It was amazing to me that they could do this in (what was, to them) a foreign language. Also, after meeting with us, some of them stayed late to do their "real" jobs (some of their analyses to support the US NRC license application was still in progress when we were there). And, especially in Tokyo, where housing in the city is SO expensive in the city, the long work days of some of the younger workers were extended by commuting times by train of more than an hour, each way (the only housing they could afford was very far outside the city). Again, I was quite impressed.

One night, while waiting for a train at the subway station near the shipyard in Kobe, Dennis, Gary, and I spoke to an American teacher who has lived in Kobe for 2-3 years. He has a contract to teach English to MHI employees at after-work-hours classes in the MHI facility. He said his students (some of whom were probably in our meetings) are VERY smart (no surprise to us at that point).



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