Observations from Japan

Greetings from Japan, everyone. I am in Tokyo for the annual CEDEC game developers conference, and got in here Thursday night. Today while heading out to Nvidia to pick up the demo machines they are loaning to us for the show, I happened to notice this girl's shoes (pic at left). Sorry I chopped heads off in this shot, but it's hard to take good pictures with a cell phone while walking in a crosswalk with hundreds of other people. Love the shoes, though. Did gold moon boots come back in style??? The shoes on the girl in the upper left look interesting, too.

At any rate, it's exciting to be here right now. Japan is holding a parliamentary election here tomorrow, and they say that after 54 years of LDP control, the opposition party, the DPJ, is going to win control of the lower house of parliament (the DPJ already controls the upper house). The Liberal Democratic Party has held control since 1955, and it appears that the Democratic Party of Japan will assume control tomorrow. Though "LDP" has the "L" word in it, believe it or not it's the politically conservative party here. Ironically, the DPJ is actually the politically liberal party. It'll be fun to watch the local news coverage to see how crazy they are about following this stuff in Japan.

Meanwhile, this pic on the right I snapped today at Nvidia's office building in Akasaka. Though this is to prevent the spread of the N1H1 virus, having hand sanitizers in public buildings probably isn't a bad idea generally, anyway. Today was a Saturday, though, so the building was largely empty - I had no way of gauging how much this thing is used.

Finally... below are daytime and nighttime panorama shots (stitched together from multiple photos) from my hotel room window. This is taken from the 26th floor of the Hotel Pacific Tokyo, overlooking the Shinagawa train station.