Tsukuba is a planned "science city," home to dozens of research institutions. I spent about four and a half weeks working here. The gist of the project:

There's a massive neutrino-detector on the other side of the country, near Toyama, called Kamiokande. Scientists have determined that it detects far fewer neutrinos than it's supposed to, which is evidence that neutrinos oscillate. But another possible explanation is that our models of how many neutrinos we're supposed to detect is wrong. The only way to know for certain is to fire a fixed number of neutrinos at the target, so you can figure out exactly how many are supposed to hit, and compare that to your results. The neutrino gun is located in Tsukuba. My job was to work in this room with these people cutting sheets of fiber optic cable. They paid pretty well for not too much work, and covered the airfare, so it was a pretty cool experience overall.