As we've been flying over Japanese cities, I was thinking that Japan and Russia have many similarities because of globalization. 

Both in Russia and in Japan you can see those "charity boxes" in public places. Many other typical signs of Western culture are also present. McDonalds in Japan? OK, it's over there!

It was even more surprising for me, when I found those typically Russian small personal gardens… in Kanazawa!
Some grasses and flowers sometimes made me think that I didn't leave Siberia.
There were however some disparities. Could it be possible to see a parrot right in the street in Krasnoyarsk? I think, no. 

Another "flying" surprise was waiting for me on the way from Tokyo to Komatsu. In Russia, we are used to consider 600 km as a very short distance. That's why it was strange for me to see a jet on such a short flight. Commonly, turboprops like ATR or Soviet An-24 serve these flights. Sometimes you even have to reach your destination by train or bus because flights for such a short distance are unprofitable and therefore unavailable.

As a participant of the Russia-Japan Preventive Medicine Program, I had been to the Cardiology ward of Kanazawa University Hospital. The working order of the ward reminded me the similar ward in Russia. At 8 a. m. the conference begins, and the doctors or students report of their patients. Once a week there is a general round, where the professor examines all patients and gives the advice on the most severe of them. Sometimes the representatives of pharmaceutical companies visit the ward and tell about their companies' latest products. Also there was many similarities in the work of catheter labs and operating rooms in Japan and Russia.

The functional diagnostic lab in Japan was however somewhat different from in Russia. At the expert level, we mostly use GE machines, while in Kanazawa they use Philips. Unfortunately, I don't know which equipment do they use for basic examination, but the Chinese machines that we use were unfamiliar for specialists in Kanazawa.

Keeping the videos of all exams was also new to me. Maybe, in the larger hospitals of Russia they do the same way, but in Krasnoyarsk we mostly keep only the text protocols of the echocardiographic exam.

The week in Japan had gone. It was very pleasant and productive time. Now I have one more week here in Kanazawa and hope it will be even more productive because the work on epidemiological research begins.