Posted on 2005/10/29 02:43:37 (October 2005).
Went to an exhibtion in the afternoon called "WPC Expo 2005". It was very interesting to see the difference between this sort of thing in Japan and the UK. The Japanese one was a lot more showy - many of the stands had professional TV presenter types doing what effectively amounted to live adverts. There was a lot of music, bizarrely people on stage dancing, and an embarassing number of women standing around in uniforms that were, well, not ideally condusive to technical discusion. This really wouldn't have been acceptable back in the UK - but Japan still seems to be somewhat behind in terms of equality of the genders. There were almost no women actually visiting the exhibition, and I only spotted at most two other Westerners there too. This felt a bit odd actually - I have started to get used to being the only Westerner on trains etc, but to be in a massive conference hall with tens of thousands of people, and still be (pretty much) the only Westerner, was a bit of an odd feeling.