Thursday evenings at Tohoku Gakuin University 04

In the last picture in yesterday's post, you may have noticed a machine in the right side of the last picture. That machine and the two in this picture are typical of Japanese universities. The coin operated machines give the students all the official documents that they used to have to talk to a human to obtain. They punch a button saying what they want, type in their student number, drop the money in the slot, and after a few seconds out pops the official document. It is faster than the old method and frees the office staff to spend more time finding ways to bug the teachers.

The yellow lines are one most sidewalks, public buildings, and the such. They are for people who are blind or nearly blind. The yellow is supposedly the most visible color to such people and the pattern is raised so that you can feel it with your feet.
The lounge for the part time teachers is on the second floor. There is a young woman, a student, I think, who is available to assist you if you have a problem. Against the far wall is an area with free coffee and tea. The mailboxes are behind me, as well as the sign-in book. I usually sit at the table, but often decide on the sofas. The sofas are quite uncomfortable because the seats are so low. My knees stick up in the air and it is very difficult to stand up.
In a room across the hall, there are copy machines that the teachers can use. Most Japanese universities require the teachers to do their own copying. So we have high paid professors spend time standing at a copy machine, while it produces handouts for the professor's next class. Overall it is very inefficient, but it is in total agreement in the Japanese sense equality.
On the day that I took these pictures, I nosed around a bit and in a corner found an old word processor with appeared to be a built-in dot matrix printer. I suspect that it has been sitting there unused, since the building was finished and that before that it was sitting unused somewhere else. The accounting rules for schools make it extremely difficult to get rid of old out-of-date equipment. Most universities have storage rooms full of old electronics that no one wants to use but that they can not discard. Recently many schools have resorted to leasing their electronics so that when they need to be replaced, the leasing company will take the machines away.