Pretty Nice Trip?
It was really a hard morning that I had to wake up very early and be ready to go out. Surely, my phone alarm alerted exactly at 7am, the time I had set before i went to bed last night, but I wasn't able to get up until the fifth alarming when it was already 7:30am. Bathing, dressing, and having breakfast were what I rushed to do before my friend, Kazuya san, came to pick me up and begin our trip at 8:20am. That was a long journey by three means, car, train and bus, which took 3 hours to get our destination. However, It was an exciting experiences to travel with many of students, researchers, engineers and other scientist invited from nearby prefectures, especially, some of them did speak english very well. Along the way, we had lunch together; I couldn't almost finish my lunch box, Bento??? for it is really big.
It was a visit of the biggest Dam attached with a huge electrical generating plant called Sakuma located in Sakuma town, Iwata district, Shizuoka prefecture, Japan. Amazingly, the 51 years old dam with the height of 155.5m still stand strongly between two mountains across a very big river. With the water stocked by the dam, Japanese people can generate 350 Megawatts operated at 50Hz and 60 Hz. Producing that quantity of electricity, Sakuma dam have always been the biggest hydraulic generator which supply partly the power consumption of Tokyo, Nagoya and other cities around such as Toyohashi.
Surprisingly, I have learnt that in Japan, electricity is operated with two different frequencies. The east part of Japan such as Tokyo use electricity with 60 Hz while the west part including Nagoya and Toyohashi, use the 50Hz one. It is because Japan used to transported equipments and electricity from two different countries, the United State and Germany. the differentiation would be a big problem with less developed countries, However, it is not a considered trouble to Japan for they can always transform the electrical frequency at anywhere in the whole country.
