This week I finally had the opportunity to visit Japan. I attended the Pacific-Rim Symposium on Image and Video Technology 2009 for lecturing our tutorial on concept-based video retrieval. With more then 50 people present during the lecture, the tutorial was well attended. I was happy to see that the topic of video search is also of scientific interest on this part of the globe. Apart from interaction with people giving talks, posters and demo’s at the conference, I had some spare time to explore Tokyo and even made a short sightseeing day trip to Nikko. My experience with this part of Japan is quite positive. Tokyo is well organized, clean, and efficient, and despite the language barrier finding your way in this metro pole is relatively straightforward. In cases you do get lost the folks around here are always willing to help. Ooh, and did I mention the quality of the food already? I was lucky that my hosts took me out to some fancy Japanese restaurants for traditional dinner, including sake of course. Today I finished my trip with a visit to Shin’ichi Satoh‘s lab at NII, presenting the latest achievements of our team in TRECVID and social image retrieval. After, again, a marvelous dinner it is now time to fly back home, but I hope to return to Japan in the near future.