Sunday, April 19, 2009

Narita Local Train Terminal

We moved our luggage to the local train terminal. We bought a SUICA card ( or a PASMO) which is used for auto fare adjustment for train,bus travel in tokyo city. This card is also useful to buy from vending machines and can be used at general stores (conveni).

We bought it for 3500 yen, thats approx. Rs. 1970 during that time. Although there is no meaning in trying to convert yen into Rs. and judging the expensiveness in japan, but as usual we do it. So this card is valid till the charge becomes zero. Its a swipe card and can be swiped on the entry and exit stations



Some pics inside the local train we took to reach our next destination - Monzen Nakacho

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For more info on Suica Pasmo Click here

Friday, April 17, 2009

Japan Kaizen Study tour - Narita Airport

At Narita Airprt in Japan, where we reached at 7 pm on March 15th, local time Japan. Airport is unbelievable clean. This was the time when we started experiencing the polite nature of the japanese people and the disciplined nature (although on the first day itself i would be facing amjor crisis).

Dr G and Shinjo-san were present at the terminal to receieve us. Shinjo-san has been helping Dr. G during the previous tours as well.

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Thursday, April 16, 2009

Japan Kaizen Study Tour

Under this head, I will keep posting some of my experiences that I had during my tour to japan.

This tour was scheduled starting from March 14th (departure from India) till 26th March (fly back from japan)

FLight that we took was Thai Airways. This was the first time i was travelling abroad and was my first international flight experience. Quality wise the flight can be rated at 6.5/10. Food was excellent and I appreciate the service of the crew despite huge number of passengers.

We had a connected flight from Mumbai to Bangkok  which took almost 6 hours and another from bangkok to Narita (Japan) airport which took around 4 hours. I hope I am correct about timings. We spent around 3 hours at the Bangkok ariport in between the flights.

Bangkok Airport, named as Swarnabhumi International Airport- has a lot of innovative designs. Looking from outside it would look like a DNA stucture replicated on four sides.

Some of the inside pics at Bangkok airport.

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Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Japan ICT Sessions

THIS comes as a rather late entry from me. I must have put this together earlier.

In the month of March, I got an opportunity to visit Japan as a part of Kaizen Study Tour for the year 2009, under the guidance of Dr. Shrinivas Gondhalekar (or Dr. G as we all call him, Founder / Expert at  KANZEN institute Asia Pacific ) and Dean (Operations) @ Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research, where I am currently pursuing my Post Graduate Diploma in Management.

This trip is a part of one the initiatives taken up by Dr. G to promote and enhance relations with Japan and make us aware of the Japanese way of living and working.

I had always been fascinated by the way japan has developed over the years after 2nd world war post which the japanese morale had been destroyed completely. Everyone knows about Hiroshima and nagasaki attacks. With my current post graduation, learning Japanese language (Nihon-go) not only as a part of curriculum but also a part of the relationship development.
Utilising ICT to have carefully charted out chat sessions with the students from Keio University in Tokyo is also a plan of this. We used to have weekly chat sessions with japanese students in groups, which focussed on specific subjects and engaged in constructive chat with a lot of information exchange. These used to happen on thursdays morning 8 AM.
A multitude of subjects like Education in Japan and India, World of mathematics, Beauty of two countries etc.
Pre-relationship building happened during  these chat sessions.
Prof Hasebe from Keio had facilitated these sessions.

These kind of sessions help in nurturing the following objectives:
Developing trust amongst the Japanese students and professors
Understand a bit about Japanese culture
Assess the level of english as a language in japan.

These sessions ran for a period of two months, each of which was followed by feedback to be submitted on the Keio blog.

Th students we interacted in these sessions were the same ones we would be meeting in our trip to Japan

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Back to blogging

I have been inactive so long here, that I had forgotten I had this blog..

Partly this was because, I think I was too busy in my MBA life and trying to make sense out of it. I completely ignored the fact it is necessary to retain knowledge that gets constantly created in the mind and till date we have not found the way to make sure we don't forget the things we create in our minds