So here’s a little bit about the trip to Aomori I took this weekend. Aomori is the northernmost prefecture on Honshu, the main island of Japan, and its name means “green forest” (or BLUE forest, if you’re either a wacked-out crackhead or color blind). And there is a lot of forest.
Green forest
Aomori is also home to Japan’s nuclear reprocessing facilities and hazardous waste facilities. And Japan certainly needs one, seeing as it gets more than half of its energy from nuclear power. You see, when you put fuel in a nuclear reactor, you get a lot of heat, some reacted material, and some unreacted material. So what they do is stick all this stuff in a big centrifuge, separating all the useful stuff from the Really Nasty Waste Products. Then they throw the useful stuff back in the “atomic furnace” (as a nuclear reactor is called here in Japan) and the process repeats itself. So what do you do with all that Really Nasty material? You melt it into glass, wrap it up really nice in layers of stuff, and bury it underneath the ground for a few hundred million years, hoping that nothing bad happens.
So I went there, but they seemed a bit nervous about cameras. Maybe they were worried about terrorists casing the joint? Bad PR from burying large yellow drums with a radioactive symbol on them? Or maybe our tour guide was just camera shy.
So after that we went to the hotel and had a big traditional feast in a traditional room, with fish and noodles and rice and mushrooms and some other stuff that I didn’t really know what it was.
The feast
Oh, and of course, we toasted with beer. Some people said that they didn’t want to toast with beer, to which the chaperoning professors looked at each other and said, “Well then, how about whiskey?”
I love this country.
Oh, and there was Karaoke too.
The puppet speaks English.
