Solar Energy Education at Ishinomaki Commercial High School

Yesterday I was lucky enough to have the experience of visiting Ishinomaki Commercial High School again for my third time. After donating solar panels to Ishinomaki after the earth quake and tsunami Elkem Japan continues to take its corporate social responsibility seriously and following up the school. Yesterday we had our first lecture to students at the school about energy, environment and silicon with the focus on solar power. As my Japanese skills are still not at a very high level (I am happy if they understand me in the store..!) my part of the presentation was in English with translation from my very nice colleague Motomura san. In addition my mentor Yoshizawa san had the other half of the presentation about silicon. I think much of the information was very new to the students, but hopefully some will get more interested and perhaps choose to study more about this in the future.

 

As my first day at work in Elkem Japan was to participate in the opening solar panels donated by Elkem this was a very nice ending on my trainee period here. Ishinomaki has given me one of my strongest impressions from Japan and I will for sure remember it after goiong back to Norway. And who knows, maybe I will come back one time in the future?

Working in Japan

My period as a trainee in Japan is nearing an end, I have only two weeks left here and it feels surreal! Working in Japan has been awesome, interesting and also extremely challenging. Japan is busy and intense with the the working life of people and the big city Tokyo. But Japan can also be very harmonic and quite with traditional Japanese lifestyle as temples and hot springs which makes up for a really interesting combination. Japanese are extremely law-obeying, polite and I think they must be the best planners in the world. I have never felt so rude and loud as here! Working here is normally a step by step process, but once a deal has been made, Japanese are the most loyal and committed partners.

The number one word in Japan is quality. The rule of thumb is the longer the queue the better, as the quality then off course has to be prime. A college at the office here asked me: If you had the choice between two restaurants: One had a very long queue outside, but the rumor said it was really good quality of food. The restaurant beside it had a little lower quality of the food, but was still good and had no queue. Which would you choose? I, not being exactly fond of queues, would without a doubt have chosen the restaurant with a little lower quality to escape the queue. My Japanese college on the other hand off course chose to wait in the queue for the best restaurant.