Tsukuba Science City

Tsukuba is a city with a university of course and many agencies dedicated to science research. It is home to JAXA or the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The headquarters of the Asian space program is also headquartered here. The city of Sapporo in Hokkaido is more non-Japanese in appearance than many cities, but Tsukuba was built from plans so that streets tend to be laid out more like a North American city and unlike Sapporo is built on flat land.
Cities such as Tokyo are essentially an amalgamation of a number of villages without any overall plan and apparently very few restrictions as to how things must be built. This results in a very erratic street pattern. Navigating some intersections can be a mind stretching exercise.
Tsukuba has a large conference centre and when we had breakfast on November 13, 2012 in the Okura Hotel near Kenji-san's as well as John Delp's mansion many "hakujin" or Caucasian people came in to have breakfast. Of course John approached the table next to us and asked 'So where are you folks from?'. The answer was Canada. Apparently most of the people having breakfast were all from Canada for some sort of science conference.

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Tsukuba Science City