I was able to tour the synchotron radiation facility, SPring-8 , and it was pretty neat! It was also very very crowded--they only open the facility to visitors for a very short window, and on the day I went they were expecting crowds of over 5,000 people! The facility was gigantic, especially the ring which launches electrons to (almost) the speed of light; as far as appearance goes, though, it was mostly just lots of heavy machinery, and really didn't look that much different from laboratories in the US. The facility itself was pretty neat though, and despite my limited knowledge of applied physics I was able to get the gist of how most of the machines worked in this particular lab. It's reminiscent of an electron collider (like the ones that lead to the discovery of the Higgs Boson recently), except that they don't smash the atoms, they only speed them up to extreme speeds. The electrons move on a curved circuit--aka, a ring--and the curves are important as this a