Short version
I’m a refugee from the US living in Japan. For several decades I’ve futzed around on industrial and commercial IT projects.
Recently I’m enamored with topics including IoT, SDGs, LoRa, LoRaWAN, robotics, etc.
My coffee addiction has driven me to roast my own coffee in a pan on the stove (with thermocouples attached, of course).
- would-be anthropologist, entrepreneur and computer scientist
- stovetop coffee roasterī¸
- Japan overstay
#Japan #coffee #IoT #SDGs #LoRa #LoRaWAN #robotics #robot #robots #coffeeroasting
Long version
I am an American who has lived in Japan for over three decades. My career has been helping small American companies to adapt their information technology products and services for the Japanese market.
To be perfectly honest, I’m somewhat reluctant to write about myself. Looking back over my life so far, it’s clear to me that everything that I have managed to accomplish is thanks in a large part to the support, collaboration and encouragement of family, friends, colleagues, mentors and other influencers. I find it’s easier to either say too little or too much, delving in to things that happened decades ago. It’s harder to talk about the fine nuances of life in the last ten years.
On the other hand, perhaps this exercise can be not only a cathartic experience but a way to reach out to others to discover common interests, perspectives and experiences and to engage in new dialogues to help make the world a better place. The web used to be about such things and I embark on this exercise in a hope that I can make a small contribution to helping it return to those hopeful origins.
Early fascination with Japan
I grew up in a small town in coastal Connecticut at a time when the fishing industry was a major part of the local economy. My father was in the US Navy and brought back many gifts while he was stationed in Japan. Among some of the gifts I remember were a Japanese scroll in our living room, a boy’s day kite made out of paper and a transistor radio. In my teens, with tips from a newspaper route, I bought a Japanese TV. In the afternoons after school, I enjoyed watching Godzilla movies. Thus begun my fascination with Japan.
Self taught computer programming
In high school, I was fascinated with computers at a time when several new “personal computers” such as the Apple II were coming onto the scene. Our school had a DEC PDP-11 with a dozen paper teletype machines connected to it. I taught myself to program by picking the garbage bins in the terminal room to follow examples by older students.
In the summers, I got jobs helping several local businesses to code software to help satisfy their needs. I helped a physics teacher to develop teaching software. I serviced an early personal computer for a local electronics store. I helped a bookstore develop a package to maintain their inventory. I worked with a local company producing factory machinery to create a database program to catalog the electrical and control wiring for their machines.
When I got to college, though initially I wasn’t interested in studying computer science, I fell back into it. As a first year freshman, I was forced through a painful process to unlearn all the bad habits I’d picked up on my own and to adopt documentation first, black box modular programming.
The following year, as a second year student, I was helping to teach first year students as an undergraduate teaching assistant in the same course. This experience of learning through teaching and giving back in some small way has stuck with me through my life and I am in awe of the people who helped to create these kinds of wonderful learning environments.
Learning Japanese
I don’t pretend to have any special facilities with languages (either with my native tongue or any other). In junior high school, we had a language requirement; only French was offered. I didn’t especially excel at memorizing masculine and feminine pronouns, so when I got to high school, I convinced the head of the school to allow me to pursue self study of computer languages as a substitute for the natural language requirement.
When I got to college, there was no language requirement, but there were more languages being taught. I remember going to speak with both a professor teaching Chinese (Mandarin) language and another teaching Japanese. The first informed me that I’d have to memorize tens of thousands of Chinese characters. The latter told me that the base of Chinese characters I’d have to master was only 2,000. Given my inability to memorize French masculine and feminine pronouns, Japanese was far more appealing (plus Japan had Godzilla).
First trip to Japan
I ended up studying Japanese for three years in college and upon graduating was given an opportunity thanks to the head of the Computer Science department to intern at the Tokyo research laboratory of a large multinational computer hardware company. During this two-month visit, I ambitiously tried to use my limited facility in the language to go out and interview executives in Japanese firms and organizations. I also found the bars under the tracks at Shinbashi Station in Tokyo to be a wonderful place to strike up informal conversations with strangers and to learn another side of the story of the rise of Japan’s economy in the post-war period.
Shift from Computer Science to Anthropology
I decided during college that there was something missing from the curriculum in the Computer Science department in terms of tools to help better utilize computer technology to facilitate various project goals in real world applications. That missing piece seemed to be better approached with the analytical devices of social sciences, so I joined a group of social scientists that was researching an ongoing effort to accomplish a digital transformation at the university by wiring the campus with ethernet. The head of that project suggested I consider going on to graduate studies in Anthropology to study the relationship between technology and culture.
After spending a summer in Tokyo, I entered graduate school in California in what I found to be a very conservative educational environment after my experiences in college. Despite considerable resistance to someone with my lack of background in social sciences, through the generosity and kindness of my advisor and other students and faculty, I somehow persevered.
I ended up back in Tokyo the following year for nine months of intensive language studies. Our classes only had 3-4 students and we were not allowed to speak anything but Japanese at school. I recall the transformational moment for me as being the first time I woke up in the morning having dreamed in Japanese.
First software project in Japan
The summer after language school, I remained in Tokyo and became ensconced in the suburban offices of a subsidiary of a large Japanese electronics conglomerate, ostensibly conducting fieldwork for a graduate research project. The company gave me some work to do and I complained that the programming tools that they were using were very primitive. They then showed me a cabinet of bootlegged software and I quickly found a product that two friends from college had created.
Impressed that I knew the creators, they asked me if I might approach my friends to see if they’d be interested in working together to create a Japanese version of their software. The technical work of the localization of the product became a project that I worked on until I graduated.
After my friends sold their product to another company, I continued to be involved with the technical support. When the product was later sold to a much larger company that didn’t want any encumbrances of foreign contracts, I helped the Japanese company to find a face-saving way to give up their rights to the Japanese version.
Banished to the countryside
My graduate school advisor was concerned that I was spending too much time on computer projects in Tokyo. She suggested that I head to the countryside so that I could study the dimensions of technology and culture more generally without limiting myself to computers. (Little did she know that the company I was working with in Tokyo had given me a 20-pound laptop to continue my work on the software project which I dutifully carried around resulting in a curious physiology which I still have today where one arm is longer than the other.)
Upon hearing of my research ambitions, an economics professor at a university in Tokyo introduced me to the town of Sakaki in Nagano with a population of 16,000 people with over 400 factories. Many Japanese and foreign scholars had visited before me and the local Chamber of Commerce kindly made arrangements so that I could make the rounds of various companies and sent me back to Tokyo with stacks of materials expecting me to simply write up my findings of a couple days of interviews on the ground. But Anthropology, as a professor I worked with described, is “slow journalism”, so I asked them if I might be able to spend a year in the town.
They reluctantly agreed to let me come for a month. A month turned into three months and eventually a year and a half (and eventually over three decades). At the time, many of the factories in the town were humming along on three shifts 24/7, but thereafter the bubble of the Japanese economy started to pop.
Starting a company
My first day in Sakaki, I met my accountant. He encouraged me to pursue a childhood dream of starting my own company, which I did before I left the town to go back to the US to write up my research.
My company started as a vehicle for the localization project I had gotten involved in. After I finished graduate school, I turned it into a full-time endeavor, helping different small software developers in the US to adapt their products to the Japanese market.
When the dollar weakened in the late 1990s, I started working with large Japanese companies to help them in their collaborations with small American companies.
That led to other projects helping American companies whose products and services relied heavily on IT to hone their distribution and fulfillment systems to interface with esoteric Japanese banking and logistics systems.
Changing Japan
Over the decades that I’ve been in Japan and doing the work that I do, Japan, both in terms of its local situations and in terms of its relationships with the rest of the world, has changed considerably.
Though Sakaki is still home to dozens of small factories, it is considerably quieter than it was when I arrived and those factories are increasingly kept running with foreign labor from other places in Asia.
Decades of deflation has resulted in an anemic society, where many of us survive by finding cheaper solutions to sustain a semblance of our former standards of living (but in the past couple of years inflation is transforming everything).
The once overflowing exuberance for “kokusai-ka” (internationalization) has been replaced with a reticent acceptance that Japan cannot continue to exist without new forms of mass immigration as well as coming to terms with a non-homogenous society and people with complex ethnic backgrounds.
Hiking
When I first arrived in Sakaki, I made a couple forays onto the tops of local mountains above the town, but it was not until the 2010s that I started venturing up into the mountains more regularly. I enjoy the ability to finish work and to head up the mountain for a short hike and to surround myself with nature. It provides a wonderful way to rejuvenate my mind in the midst of projects that consume my thoughts.
In the course of my hikes, I have met many wild animals. Usually these are just pheasants, snakes, foxes, deer and antelopes but on several occasions now I have had encounters with black bears, badgers and wild boars. I also use the occasion of hiking to collect water to make coffee.
Coffee roasting
My high consumption of coffee led me to start roasting coffee. When I got started with this pursuit, I had one goal in mind. Instead of buying all sorts of expensive equipment, I wanted to make use of things that we had in our house already. I’ve now roasted a couple hundred of pounds of coffee, but I continue to roast in small batches in a sauce pan on the stove in the kitchen (fortunately others in my family are coffee drinkers).
A couple years into this pursuit I decided I wanted to make use of an open-source software product to connect thermocouples to monitor my roasts, to try to improve the results and to be able to develop different profiles for particular varieties of coffee altering the levels of roasts accordingly.
My current palate and those of my friends and family who consume my coffee and provide me encouragement tend to favor somewhat darker roasts. Luckily, roasting in a pan is well suited to such results. But through the use of thermocouples and software, I’ve been able to explore lighter roasts more suitable to particular beans.
Gastronomic pursuits
I have been fortunate to be able to accompany friends and family to enjoy some incredible gastronomic adventures here in Japan, in South East Asia and in the US. Personally, I suppose I am most interested in the ways that local culture over many generations has influenced different cuisines, and how traditions of healthy eating evolved before the creation of the modern mass-production food conveniences. But I’ve also had the good fortune recently, thanks to several generous friends, to indulge in some Michelin-class food adventures in Japan.
Peaceful Japan
Many years ago, a neighbor from the small community where I grew up drove me and my bride from Japan to our wedding ceremony. He had fought in World War Two. I later learned that the task of driving us was a more complex psychological undertaking for him than I had imagined.
It is heartening that Japan and the US, once bitter enemies have become some of the best of allies. I am grateful to many people in both Japan and the US who have provided me so many learning experiences and helped my personal pursuits.
In the twenty-first century we have entered an era in which we need to re-examine the nature of the Japan-US alliance and the role of each nation and it’s people in relation to other countries and peoples. That process is understandably going to involve new challenges and difficulties, but I am hopeful that we can work together to discard some of the aspects that no longer suit the present situation and to identify the positive elements in this friendship and work to enhance them.
Thank you for reading this content by Christopher Keener (the duck). I welcome feedback, ideas and suggestions. Please reach out to me via the social media links below or via email.