Young vis­it­ors from Ja­pan

The foyer was buzz­ing with activ­ity when the group of 37 people ar­rived at our in­sti­tute. The 28 stu­dents were ac­com­pan­ied by 4 teach­ers and a num­ber of or­gan­isers, trans­lat­ors and even a pho­to­grapher. They were greeted by our Ja­pan­ese co­oper­a­tion part­ner Man­abu Fukui, who is cur­rently on a re­search visit to Bre­men. He was act­ively sup­por­ted by col­leagues from the work­shops and ad­min­is­tra­tion, amongst oth­ers.
The vis­it­ors first im­mersed them­selves in one of our re­search top­ics: Sci­ent­ist Anke Meyerdierks in­tro­duced them to the in­sti­tute and talked about her work on hy­dro­thermal vents in the deep sea. The group then went on a tour of the build­ing. They vis­ited our elec­tron­ics work­shop and the so-called Seat­ech hall, where equip­ment is de­veloped and built for use on re­search ves­sels and ex­ped­i­tions.
Af­ter­wards, there was ample time for ques­tions and to take a group photo.

The pu­pils were very in­ter­ested. They them­selves also had to make quite an ef­fort for their visit to Bre­men: In the Öta dis­trict, which is part of Tokyo pre­fec­ture, there are a total of 28 ju­nior high schools. Only one pu­pil from each of these was se­lec­ted through an ap­plic­a­tion pro­cess to take part in the trip to Bre­men. The se­lec­tion pro­cess con­sisted of a per­sonal ap­plic­a­tion and took into ac­count pre­vi­ous aca­demic and ex­tra­cur­ricular achieve­ments.

The visit was great fun and we hope to have given the young vis­it­ors an en­joy­able af­ter­noon and per­haps see some of them again one day in our Marmic pro­gramme!