Dante Loretta

And so became good friends with the scientists.

They have their own asteroid sample return mission.

That's flying right now.

In fact, we'll get to their asteroid next year, so there's a lot of similarities between what they're doing and what we're doing.

I love the Japanese Hawaii culture.

So you can see here, you know, the rocket is launching the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft on its journey to their asteroid, Ryugu, which is named after the dragon that lives at the bottom of the sea in Japanese mythology.

And then when President Hart found out about this, she got really excited and we actually invited the leaders of the Japanese Space Agency to come visit the University of Arizona and talk about ways that we could work together.

And then we did a reciprocal visit where President Hart and a couple of the Arizona Board of Regents members, along with the director of the Lunar Planetary Lab at Stewart Observatory and

the vice president for research, we all went to their headquarters in Sagamihara and we signed a strategic partnership agreement between the University of Arizona and the Japanese Space Agency and we are working together now very collaboratively to discuss ways to help each other to explore the solar system together.

We have a very tight coupling now between the OSIRIS-REx and the Hayabusa 2 teams

where we're sharing lessons learned, we share software, data analysis techniques, personnel.

We have one of our postdocs is over there living in Japan, co-located for a year, and then we'll come back to Tucson and we're inviting Japanese scientists to spend time in Arizona.

So having that humanities education where I learned not only the language, but the culture, the history.

You know, when you go to Japan as a gaijin, it's

You treat it a certain way, very politely, but also somewhat distant, until you can become part of the in-group.

And it depends on the social situation.

And probably the most important thing that I learned is that when you go to a formal meeting and you're sitting around a conference table, you're not going to make a lot of progress in coming together with mutual agreement or finding out even what's going on or what they're worried about.

But when you go out afterwards and you sit around and you drink sake and you eat the wonderful Japanese food,

Then things loosen up and you get to be more friends.

And that's the relationship that it established.