Living in Ikoma (生駒) often feels like existing in a low-pass filter between two high-frequency extremes. On one side of the mountain lies the neon density of Osaka, and on the other, the quiet, ancient basin of Nara. Tucked into the forested slopes of Takayama is NAIST (Nara Institute of Science and Technology), where most of my waking hours are spent debugging ROS nodes, untangling sensor wiring, and staring at loss curves until matrices blur into white noise.
It is easy in robotics to forget what physics actually feels like when it isn’t simulated in Gazebo. When your universe shrinks to soldering irons, cheap cardboard prototypes, and motor torque limits, you risk treating embodiment as a purely mathematical problem.
That is why on weekends, I deliberately pull the plug.
The Hillside Habitat
Ikoma isn’t Tokyo, so life here is steep stone staircases cut through mossy cedar groves, cable cars creaking uphill past small shrines, and tiny counter shops where a 70-year-old master slides a steaming bowl of tonkotsu ramen across a worn wooden plank without saying more than two words.
There is an organic determinism here that software rarely captures, like cedar trees don’t grow according to an optimized global cost function lol, but adapt to micro-shifts in wind, root space, sunlight, etc. Walking uphill through Hozan-ji with my dog, Miso, bouncing along the stone steps, I find myself watching biological kinematics, say the way quadrupedal joints passively absorb shock without a central processor burning kilowatts of compute is a humbling reality check for any robotics student trying to balance an inverted pendulum.
A Dash to the Sea
Nara is famously landlocked, ringed by mountains that trap heat in summer and frost in winter. When the lab air feels too stale, Miso and I load into the car early in the morning and head out. The closest true open water is south toward the coast of Wakayama or out toward Osaka Bay and Sennan.
Driving down through the passes, the dense green canopy gradually gives way to wide horizons and humid salt air, and by mid-morning, the drone of the highway drops off, replaced by the rhythmic cadence of surf crashing onto sand. <3
Miso treats the beach like an unmapped coordinate frame, she doesn't compute terrain elevation maps hihi, she just runs, her paws instantly shifting gait from packed wet sand to loose drift without a single dropped frame.
Sitting on the sand towel after a swim, shivering slightly in the ocean breeze with salt clinging to wet skin and sandy toes, there’s an immediate clarity that no whiteboard session can produce, considering the ocean is chaotic, high-entropy, and indifferent to us and our thoughts. Interfacing an artificial agent with the physical world requires that same resilience—an architecture built to survive real friction, unexpected gusts, and dirty inputs rather than idealized test vectors.
Touching Grass to Build Silicon
Most breakthroughs in robotics don't come from staring longer at an IDE. They come from grounding yourself in the messy, analog world your machines are supposed to inhabit.
Living in Ikoma gives you the quiet space to build, and the coast gives you the perspective to remember why you do it all. Back at the desk tonight, the breadboards, servo leads, and lines of code won't feel like abstract puzzles anymore—they're just an attempt to borrow a fraction of the elegance that already exists right outside the lab door.
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