Matsuyama Japan

I've just arrived in Matsuyama, capital city of Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku, the smallest of the four major islands of Japan. Here's a map. I'm here to collaborate with a professor at Ehime University who works on Chinese dialects. I'll be staying five weeks (interrupted by a week in Taiwan), followed by 10 days in Korea.

The money paying for me to be here is a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. When I arrived, my host handed me my stipend: an envelope full of about $6,000 in cash. Fifty-nine 10,000 yen notes (each worth roughly $100):

I'm staying at the shoku'in kaikan 職員会館 "faculty guesthouse" of the university. The room is quite plain and, typical for Japan, a bit cramped.

But it is clean and reasonably comfortable, although my pillow seems to be filled with pebbles.

There is a nice view out the window of a soccer pitch and hills beyond.

Matsuyama is surrounded by hills that look just like this: low, steep-sided, and lush.

My door has a slit in the bottom.  I don't know why.  It's angled downward (from inside to outside), so it wouldn't be useful for inserting something into the room.  Perhaps it is a safety feature, somehow letting you see if someone is standing outside?

The bathroom is really tiny, but also typically for Japan, even a very plain room like mine has a fancy automated toilet.

The control panel looks like this:

The pictures are pretty self-explanatory.

Seems there are funny signs every place I stay in Asia.  This is the best one in my room:

My location is great.  It's quiet, there's a shinto shrine nearby, I'm less than 10 minutes' walk from campus, and there is a 24-hour mart a block away.

My room includes breakfast service, which will be the subject of my next blog entry.