Comics and corporate finance law

Today has been quite surreal. I woke up and did some 'studying' (I tried, honest...) and then headed off to join the otaku at Comiket in Odaiba with some friends. This event is the world's largest hand-made comic book fair (according to wikipedia) and I have never seen so many people in one place at the same time - it was absolutely heaving!


We kind of didn't anticipate how popular the whole thing was going to be, and there's really only two ways to get to Odaiba, both of which were so busy that it took us about an hour to get to the Tokyo Big Sight (where it's held) and then about 10 minutes to get in. This left me with only about 15 minutes to actually look around before I had to head back to Shimbashi for my final JSDA lesson :( Which just means that I have an excuse to go back again tomorrow :) I spent all the time today checking out the cosplay area outside. Cosplay is when people dress up as their favourite anime characters, and some of the costumes were really impressive.





You could tell which costumes were condsidered to be the best, as they drew the largest crowd of cosplay-paparazzi:


It was a shame to have to go back to class but today's lesson was really useful. We finished up the section on Japanese corporate law, other finance laws and then moved on to calculations associated with bonds and financial statements. There is so much to learn!! Thankfully we did a lot of going over what we've already learnt. I've now just got to memorise it all over the next four days and also work out how to decipher the garbled exam questions.

Another one?!

Tokyo got another wee tremor just before 8.00am this morning. It made the floor rumble underneath where I was sitting and my rice cooker (which is balancing on top of my fridge) was wobbling about, but it thankfully only lasted about a minute or so. I think three earthquakes in one week is enough, thank you very much, Earth.

Lessons today were just as intense as yesterday and included some maths this time, too. The maths is dead simple but remembering the hundreds (okay, maybe about 40...) equations is going to be an absolute nightmare. I'm going to have to go and study in a minute and will be revising and practicing past paper questions all weekend. At least it will all be over by Wednesday afternoon. I'm already planning on going for a celebratory manicure - you can get a decent one for only £8! Actually, I bought some pretty crazy fake nails when I was shopping in Venus Fort yesterday, and I fully intend to get my nails done Shibuya-girl-style before coming home.

I've eventually got around to setting up a flickr account so that everyone at home can see my photos and won't be subjected to a ridiculously long slide-show when I get back. I've taken far too many and only managed to upload about half so far. Check them out here. I'm continually adding more every day and put them up in the same groups I uploaded from my cameras, i.e. the order is a bit messed up at times. A nice way to look at them is by area on my map. Enjoy!

I heart Odaiba

Just like mameshiba does! More on my new favourite area of Tokyo in a minute.

Today was the first day of my JSDA exam course. The guy who takes the course is really good - he's a good laugh and can explain things really well, but moves at an incredibly fast speed. He may even talk faster than I do. I have met my match... Surprisingly, some of the laws we're learning about are quite interesting, and I was shocked that a few have been recently implemented specifically to prevent the Yakuza from laundering money. I hadn't realised how prevalent the Yakuza still were in Japan, but securities firms have to be very careful when it comes to loss compensation as this was, up until quite recently, helping fund the Japanese mafia.

Learning the facts is going to turn out to be (relatively) the easiest bit. Deciphering the exam questions is considerably more tricky - the translation into English is, at best, extremely confusing. I realised things weren't going to go well when I read this statement on the front of the past papers:

"This examination is conducted in the Japanese only. The English translations of the questions are prepared solely for your information. Therefore, the Japanese version shall prevail if there is any discrepancy. You are not allowed to ask any questions or make complaints about expressions in the English."

Well that's me told... The course is pretty intense and there is so much to learn for the exam next Wednesday. I'm going to have to spend my whole weekend and all day Monday and Tuesday revising. Woop woop.

After today's lesson, I hopped onto the driverless monorail that goes to Odaiba, a man-made island in Tokyo Bay. This area of Tokyo is absolutely mental! The buildings are all so quirky on the outside and everything else is really kitsch. The weirdest looking structure has to be the Fuji TV building, with its floating sphere.


And, of course, there's a miniature version of the Statue of Liberty.


For some reason there is a giant model of Gundam (I think he looks like a transformer...) that moves and lights up.


Odaiba is also home to four of the biggest shopping malls I have ever seen. One even includes an amusement park, it's that big. Venus Fort is decked out on the inside to look like 'Italy':


And two floors of Decks have been turned into Hong Kong:


There's a Toyota showroom that's so big, it has its own indoor test track:


This double-act were hanging about outside one of the malls (the monkey looks genuinely unimpressed...):


And these two pretty much made my day:

Saltire blog part 4

My round up of week four is now up on the Saltire site. Check it out here.

EARTHQUAKE!

I was woken up at 5:07am today as my room was being shaken about by a magnitude 4.3 earthquake (it was 6.6 nearer the source). It took me a few seconds to work out what on earth was happening, why my bed was shaking, and why everything that I could see through my window was moving and then I pretty much sat bolt upright and thought, "what do I do now?!" Thankfully the tremors only lasted a couple of minutes, but that was long enough for me to transition from being fast asleep to being more than wide awake and very alarmed! The weirdest bit was that even when the ground had stopped shaking, my building was still swaying from side to side. My apartment is on the 8th floor... :S

I now know to be extremely careful what I wish for!

I remembered to take my coat to work today as the weather reports were saying that typhoon Etau was going to hit Tokyo today (apparently the heavy rain yesterday was just a normal tropical storm...). It rained a little for about an hour in the morning and then was sunny all afternoon. I'm pretty sure the typhoon missed Japan and headed straight to the Pacific Ocean instead. Quite glad really, I think having and earthquake AND a typhoon on the same day would be a bit much really.

Work today was good - one of the guys spent an hour explaining how they use combinations of options and interest rate swaps to make more complicated structures. It doesn't sound it, but it is actually really interesting. Hopefully I'll get to come back to this desk for a few more days to learn some more. At the end of the day I got the 'exercise book' for my course, which starts tomorrow. It basically looks like I'm going to be studying for an exam on Japanese financial law. This sales rep 2 malarky could be a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.

Mother Nature

Everybody at work todat was talking about yesterday's earthquake; I felt really left out... On one hand, I'm absolutely gutted to have missed it as there probably won't be another earthquake while I'm living here. On the other hand, I think I would have crapped myself had I been on my own when it happened - it made buildings shake and people's stuff moved around. A lot of the objects in my room were not where I left them - my fax machine was hanging off the edge of the desk. Apparently it's usually quite difficult to stay standing up in a magnitude 4.0 earthquake, which is what it was. Scary stuff!

When I got up this morning, it was raining so heavily that it was almost still dark. Thankfully, the rain had eased off a bit by the time I needed to leave for work, so I assumed that the rain was about to finish for the day and left with no jacket or coat and only a wee umbrella. This turned out to be a massive error on my part - Tokyo was hit by typhoon Etau today. Oops. I have never seen such heavy rain before!

My schedule for this week is a bit messed up because on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, I'm going to a different office for my JSDA Sales Rep exam course. I was meant to be spending the whole week with the structures desk (FX and interest rate structures for Japanese clients) but will only get two days with them this week and maybe a couple somewhere else. This is a bit of a shame as they are all really nice guys and the structures they design and price are actually pretty interesting.

Kyoto: the sights and sounds

In one word: wow. Now let me explain...

On Saturday I got to my first temple at 8.45am (don't worry, I've not had a personality transplant), which turned out to be a good idea for two reasons - it wasn't too hot yet (only about 28 degrees!) and it wasn't too busy yet. After walking up a little hill, lined with gift shops, I reached the entrance of Kiyomizu-dera.


Most of the buildings in this temple are 400 years old, although there has been a temple there since the 7th century.


The main building is built on giant slits and sits on the hillside.


Its famous for its sacred springs (mizu is Japanese for water), which are meant to have healing powers. I drank some but I can't say I've felt the benefits yet...


I also came across this crowd, no idea why they're wearing bibs:



I later found out that I picked a good day to visit Kiyomizu-dera - apparently if you went on that Saturday, you get the same spiritual benefits as going for 1000 days! After wandering around the area for a while I headed down some brilliant old streets (I later found out that this is the Lonely Planet's recommended path) towards my next temple. On the way, I bumped into these two:




They looked even more beautiful in real life. I can't even begin to imagine how uncomfortable they must have been though, it was about 30 degrees by this point and they were wearing so many layers! The heat in Kyoto was unbearable - weather reports said it was 33 degrees, but with about 50% humidity and not a cloud in the sky, it felt more like 40 degrees. I thought I was about to spontaneously combust on a number of occasions.

Yasaka-jinja was the next shrine I visited, and there was actually some sort of service being held inside, so I couldn't go into the main bit. There were so many lanterns hanging from one of the buildings.




I then hopped on the bus to Ginkaku-ji (the Silver Pavilion), which was a bit confusing as you get on through the back door and pay on your way out... This was one of my favourite temples at it had immaculate gardens - there were people employed to sweep any fallen leaves off the moss on the hillside, that's how beautifully kept the grounds were.




I then walked along the 'Philosopher's Path' towards Nanzen-ji. This two-kilometer long river-side path is a beautiful way to get between temples and is lined with cherry blossom trees that must look incredible in Spring.

I was impressed by the inside of Nanzen-ji as they still have all the original wood panels and painted sliding doors that have been there for centuries.




I spent the rest of the afternoon essentially getting lost. Kyoto is a wonderful city to get lost in - it's a brilliant mix of old, winding streets lined with traditional buildings and syscrapers and shopping malls. I spent most of the afternoon wandering around Nishiki Food Market and indulging in some retail therapy (my excuse is that I needed to go into the shops to cool down...). It turns out that I have some sort of homing signal as I managed to shop myself back to within 20 yards of my ryokan without even realisng it!

I woke up on Saturday to discover that a monsoon had descended on the city. This didn't put me off sightseeing though and actually helped to cool down the air a bit. Unfortunately, the rain added to the humidty, offsetting any good it had done by making everything damp and sticky. It also made taking photos very difficult as I kept getting tiny water droplets on my lense everytime I pointed the camera up, which was generally where everything I wanted to take a photo of was. Oh well.

I got the bus to Kinkaku-ji, or 'The Golden Pavilion'. This temple is incredible - it sits in the middle of an ancient, man-made pond and is completely covered in gold leaf. When it's sunny, it must be blinding to look at!


My next stop, Ryotoku-ji, was a short walk away. It is famous for its really old zen garden:


I thought that these trees were pretty cool, too:



I then walked further out and went to visit Ninna-ji - this was my favourite temple of the day because I wanted to move into the palace part of it. This is a series of beautiful, old Japanese buildings that are all connected by open walkways and surrounded by perfect bonsai and zen gardens.




Within the temple complex (it covers a huge area), there are loads of other buildings and shrines, including a five-storey pagoda.



The last pace I had time to visit before catching the shinkansen back was Nijo-jo (Nijo Castle). This castle sits in the centre of Kyoto (much like Edinburgh Castle) and is surrounded by ridiculously tall and thick granite walls and a moat. The inside of the palace was amazing, but they didn't let me take any photos :( All of the painted walls, ceilings and screen doors remain intact, as do all the paper walls and carved wooden decorations. The best part that has survived has to be the the 'nightingale floor' that encircles all of the rooms. This floor quietly sqeaks whenever you step on it - it doesn't make a wooden creaking noise, it actually almost sings, hence the name. I thought it was brilliant that it still works perfectly (I have no idea how the noise is created) and it made for fantastic background noise with everyone walking around the palace and looking into the rooms.

Kyoto: my ryokan and the food

My ryokan couldn't have been more perfect. I wanted to stay in a traditional Japanese-style hotel that served Japanese food and I got more than what I wanted - a fantastic room, very friendly staff, delicious food and located in the Gion district, right in the centre of Kyoto. Perfect! I couldn't recommend 'Kamogawa-kan Inn' more if you ever need a place to stay in Kyoto.

My room was surprisingly big and decked out in traditional Japanese tatami and furniture, with paper sliding windows.



I had just enough time to settle in before the two, old Japanese ladies who worked in the ryokan started to bring my kaiseki (Japanese haute cuisine) dinner. They were so kind and friendly and did absolutely everything for me!


The plates of food just kept on coming - this is what my table ended up looking like:


Every dish came with its own dipping sauce and I got a big tub of rice on the side too. It was all presented beautifully, but my favourite had to be the snow-igloo that my sashimi came in.


The food was all so delicious, so it's a bit of a shame that I still have no idea what some of it was! I asked, but didn't understand the Japanese response... The meal as a whole is very different to meals in the UK - there is a very odd mix of savoury and sweet flavours on the same plate and often in the same item. For example, small, crispy, sugared fish: salty on the inside, syrupy on the outside. The first one was a bit of a surprise, the second was quite enjoyable, but buy the third one, I had eaten enough!

The Japanese women then insisted that I got changed into the yukata that came with the room, so I obliged and got them to help me tie it. I am going to have to get myself one as they're really good.


Breakfast the next morning was another multi-course extravaganza. Again, no idea what half of it was - prizes to whoever knows what the contents of the little dishes were!


After breakfast, I was asked whether I wanted a kaiseki dinner again or shabu shabu (kind of like a meat fondue). I couldn't make my mind up so they gave me kaiseki with my own little mini shabu shabu as one of the courses! I had clearly been given the gaijin-friendly kaiseki the first night, but, impressed that I had eaten all of that, they gave me the real deal on Saturday:


One of the dishes was a speciality from the Osaka region (I think that's what she said...) and consisted solely of two fish heads. Now, whenever I eat whole fish at home, I usually stop before I get to the face. There turned out to be a surprising amount of flesh in there actually, although I couldn't face eating the eyes. The sashimi dish included sea urchin this time - I've already tried this on sushi I didn't really fancy eating it again, but did out of politeness... You know the smell of the sea lion enclosure at the zoo? That's exactly what uni tastes like.

I managed enough Japanese to have wee conversations with the two ladies and they thought I was hilarious as a result of my efforts. I must have been semi-articulate as they empathised with me when I explained how hot I was finding the weather in Kyoto compared to at home. They were so nice and took this into account when preparing my breakfast for Sunday morning; giving me dishes that were designed to cool me down, like iced tofu.


The meals were just incredicble - I want to go back just to eat some more!

For lunch, I just got food while I was out and about. Kyoto happens to have a chain of coffee houses with a very appropriate name:


I found one of my new favourite places too: Mister Donut. This is pretty much the Japanese equivalent of Krispy Kreme and every donut is only 100yen (60p!).


So on Sunday, I decided to have a variety of doughnuts for my lunch. Why? Because I'm a grown-up and can eat doughnuts for my lunch if I want to :)

Where to start...

This weekend has been so incredible, I honestly don't even know where to start!

My ryokan was amazing.
The food was some of the best I've eaten so far.
Kyoto's temples are stunning.
The climate was the hottest I've ever experienced - I got sunburnt whlist wearing factor 50+ sunscreen... THAT'S how hot it was.
The shinkansen train travelled at ridiculous speeds.
And I missed the earthquake in Tokyo this evening that hit 4.0 on the richter scale.

I'm absolutely gutted about the last one - I secretly want to experience a little (not a big one, please!) earthquake while I'm staying in Japan, so I can't believe I was away the weekend Tokyo got one. Apparently buildings moved a bit!

As a result of spending the last two days running around Kyoto, I'm absolutely shattered and will blog properly about my weekend tomorrow. After I've uploaded my rather large collection of photos :)

Intermission

I'm heading to Kyoto tomorrow straight after work for the weekend so there will be no more posts probably until Monday night.

I've been embracing my inner (and outer...) nerd over the past few days working with the quants. Today I finished my two pricing models! They both price a call option - one analytically, using the Black-Scholes model and the other using Monte Carlo simulations. I designed and programmed wee interfaces as well that you type the parameters into (stock price, strike, risk free rate, time to maturity, etc), then press a big button that says "RUN" and it spits out the result. Everybody was very impressed and I'm very proud that I managed to go from having no programming knowledge to designing pricing models in C# in the space of three days! God, I'm a geek... Next thing you know I'll start wearing a pocket protector.

This week has been very different from the last few as the quants have very British work ethics. As in they rock up at 9am, take three coffee breaks a day (that involve leaving the building and walking to insanely posh coffee shops), have a two-hour lunch break (in very posh restaurants) and then head home at about 6.30. I think I've managed to fit in quite well :)

Today's lunch was very tasty - spicy tuna donburi:



Went out for dinner and drinks with Stephen and Zach after work. Ate things on sticks while stading up and then went to a bar where all the drinks were £2. Definitely a good night.

Saltire blog part 3

Oops! Totally forgot to put a link to my round up of week three on this blog yesterday...

So here is the third installment of my SaltireFoundation blog for you to peruse at your leisure.

Reasons why I love Tokyo

AKA Reasons why I'm not coming home. Ever.

In no particular order:

The shops are fantastic and so eclectically mental.
People are so polite all the time, even if I'm being an annoying gaijin and getting in their way/not understanding them.
The food is delicious and very reasonably priced. And you don't need to tip.
The overground and underground train systems are super-efficient all over Tokyo and the surrounding areas; there are underground stations on every block and trains every couple of minutes.
All the trains and most of the stations are fully air-conditioned (why can't the London tube be like that...).
You get full 3G mobile reception everywhere, including the underground stations and on the trains (even while they're moving through the tunnels!).
You also get wifi in most stations and trains and they have mobile WiMAX here already.
It's the safest city I've ever been to. And the most convenient.
It's so easy to get away from it all by going to one of the beautiful shrines or heading to the countryside.
Everybody holds lift doors open for people when they get on and off.
All women always use the 'toilet flush sound effect' so you don't hear them pee (I do it too now, so I don't get nasty looks when I come out the cubicle).
If a person has a cold, they wear a surgical mask so that nobody else catches it from them.
There are cartoon characters on everything and everywhere and it is completely socially acceptable to buy things with cartoon characters on them, regardless of your age/sex/occupation.
The posters and adverts are often hilarious.
You will never be thirsty as there are vending machines every 20 yards or so.
So many things are open so late - shops until 10pm, restaurants until midnight and cinemas, bars and internet cafes often all night.
The people who I work with have restored my faith in financial industries and are all so lovely, kind and very down to earth. As far as I can see, RBS Tokyo is not one of the bad guys (they blame everyone at the other RBSs...).
Everybody from Tokyo is slim, looks fantastic and dresses impecably stylishly.
I must be the only female over the age of 16 who doesn't wear stilletoes everyday (how do they manage?!).
Everything is newer than brand new.

The last point was further highlighted when I nipped to the local electronics store after dinner today (a massive 8 floor extravaganza). I needed to buy an external hard drive to store all my millions of photos on! I ended up getting a new flash drive too, as I keep breaking freebie ones I get from career fairs. Check out the 4GB one I bought:


Huge, isn't it? The bit on the left is only the lid! The actual drive is only that 5mm black bit at the top! And it was only £10 - technology is so far advanced here, it's unbelievable. When I was paying for my cool stuff, I saw this TV and instantly wanted to win the lottery so that I could buy it.


It's a 103 inch high definition plasma screen and probably one of most impressive pieces of kit I have ever seen. It costs about £40,000. Yikes...

Work today was really good fun actually and it's going to sound really sad when I tell you what I found enjoyable - today was my first day of learning C#; a computer programming language. I feel so cool right now... Thing is, learning a bit of programming is massively useful for me right now and also completely applicable to what I'm studying at uni next year as well as what I'm doing at work just now. So it's win win for me! I was so proud of my day's achievements - I made a few wee programmes that estimated the value of pi using truncated infinite sums and then Monte Carlo simulations. NERD ALERT. I also used some graphics to display the results and calculation time with buttons and progress bars. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to go into more detail about the maths behind more complicated Monte Carlo simulations and make a programme that will price trades.

Remember folks: it's hip to be square.

My first day as a quant

I woke up this morning to discover that mosquitoes found one of my legs very tasty yesterday - I've got really itchy bites all around my ankle, the only part of skin that was exposed, and two on my leg that mean they must have bitten through my leggings!

I'm spending this week with the quantative developers, or 'quants' as they're called in the business. These are the guys (I don't think they have female quants...) who write all the programmes, spreadsheets and other bits of software for the traders and sales people. Basically, if you need to calculate the risk, volatilty or price of a particular trade or portfolio, you ask a quant and they will come up with an awfully clever way of doing it using a computer.

The three guys who work at RBS Tokyo all come from similar backgrounds to mine - two did engineering degrees and the other has a degree and PhD in physics. It seems to me that many of the scientists who go into finance end up as quants or in research. Quants are the nerds of the financial world, so it makes sense I suppose... The plan for this week is for me to learn some C# programming language and write a programme that will shift data sets around and send them to a pre-programmed Excel spreadsheet. I'm more than happy to get some programming experience as, surprisingly, I don't get taught any coding languages as part of my uni course. I'm hoping that this experience will look good on my application to CERN next year :)

Today was another day of good food. I'm probably going to come home the size of the Buddha at Daibutsu... We went out for lunch at a brilliant Japanese restaurant in my building that specialises in grilled chicken and fish. I opted for the chicken set and was not disappointed:


I got this immaculately presented plate of various grilled and fried bits of chicken, a bowl of rice, pickles, endless cups of tea and a huge bowl of miso that was more like a stew because it had so much extra stuff in it. All in a stunningly decorated restaurant and for £10. Yum yum yum yum... Later on, a colleague came over with ridiculously posh cakes that he had been given by his broker. I couldn't say no to his kind offer and chose this delicious blueberry layered mousse:


For my tea, I got a big bao tze and a giant Thai chicken salad from Daimaru's foodhall. Also on the way home, I stopped at a wee shop that sells bean-paste filled waffle-type-things in the shape of fish.


This is a sweet that is traditionaly from the area of Tokyo that I'm staying in (Nihombashi, I can't remember what the sweet is called though...) and they make them freshly for you.