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So today we have a big news for ASI Naito, and we have a new host is the big news.
Masaako will be dearly missed and she will come back time to time, but as a typical academic, she
has grant writing and other business to do to keep her lives afloat, and obviously she should prioritize that.
So here you are, Len. We have Len, and I don't know, do you want to introduce yourself?
Sure, yeah, I can introduce myself. Yeah, a stressful endeavor, but a necessary one, right?
So I wish her all the best with dealing with that. You actually met Masaako too, right?
Yeah, yeah, I did. Many, many years ago at this point. Many moons ago at this point.
Yeah, a couple of exchanges here and there, so I certainly feel for her sort of situation. It's
not an easy one to be in, right, but as a PI of a lab, it's certainly one of the responsibilities
you take on. Yeah, I guess I can do a little introduction. So I've already had my name
introduced, Len. Len is easy enough. It works out pretty well. Which is confusing because Len is
actually a legit Japanese name. I don't know if you found out. It makes it rather easy though
to exchange my name, right? So, you know, Len or the L-R sound that I cannot, you know,
perfectly grasp, right, is exactly, is entirely fine, right? They're good enough, right, between
the two. You would rather go by Len than Leonard. Yeah, yeah, we won't go the whole way, but my name
gets very long very quickly. I think probably within the first week that I arrived in Japan,
you know, two years ago, which I can introduce his background later. Yeah, the response I got
when somebody asked me for my name the first time was like, no good. Like, it was just so long,
like it filled, you know, either the boxes they were in or they were, you know. It was just an
absolutely shocked and sort of broke. It broke the barrier between that communication at the
moment, right? The very formal official barrier to be like, I thought the name Leonard would be
somewhat more common given the popularity of the Big Bang Theory. Yeah, it was Leonard was okay,
03:00
but my full name does it. Yeah, your full name is too much. Yeah, my full name is it's 777 and
then an additional, you know, sort of suffix on top. So, yeah, too many letters. I should stop
interrupting your introduction. We all got it. Your name is Len. Now what? It's perhaps too
normal for our conversational style for interrupts. So, yeah, so I mentioned, you know, that I came
here, you know, two years ago, right? I finished up a PhD program as well in the, you know, in the
same sort of program department as you and that's where we had met. Yep. It was also during that time
that I had met Misako and since then I sort of shifted my direction. You know, I did a lot of
computational chemistry work back in grad school. That was entirely sort of whirlwind of an
experience, which can certainly... It feels like a different era for you. It is an entirely different
era for me. There was a rather, you know, hard shift, at least career-wise, right? Finishing that
and then moving to Japan, right? To do English teaching, of all things. Yeah, I mean,
there's so many questions one could ask, given this just really small bits of information.
But maybe start with what brings you to Japan. So, hooray, you got a PhD in chemistry.
And you wanted to do something other than research, which is an entirely common sort of
pathway, I guess, for a lot of post-PhD people. And you could have done any number of things,
but decided to come to Japan to teach English to high school kids. Yeah, so there's a
usual response I give, because obviously I get this question quite a lot, right?
But to maybe add a little bit more here, as I was finishing the PhD program, I just realized that
the research, as much as it had an impact on the field that I was in, wasn't necessarily
driving me forward, right? I wasn't wholly motivated to sort of stick with that particular path.
And, you know, a variety of other things kind of left me feeling disinterested, right? At the very
least, in that sort of direction. And so what that led me to do was look up alternative PhD careers,
right? There is a term for this, of which I cannot remember, because it was many, many years ago that
I was looking for it. There's a particular one that I think it starts with the might be a V.
If it comes back to me, I'll bring it up later. But you get the list, right, of PhDs that shift
into roles. Right, what you could do with the PhD that doesn't directly have anything to do
06:01
with the research. Exactly. It's the idea of that whole transitional or transferable skill sets.
That was part of the searching, right? So, you know, you get anything from, well,
you could join finance to, well, you could become a baker. And these are all right,
all entirely valid, very valid options. Yep. One more delicious than the other. But yeah,
so. So I sort of sent that track and I found myself remembering that before grad school,
I had actually had a desire to go and both teach and live abroad. I wanted to do something
outside of the U.S. I didn't know that. Yeah, it was it was an earlier goal. And
regrettably, but I understand why I actually had a mentor from high school kind of veer me away
from that. Oh, interesting. It was it was not, I think, intentionally sort of putting it down,
but it was I mentioned the idea of like, oh, yeah, I think I want to go abroad and
maybe teach English for a little while in Japan because I was actually taking Japanese
classes in undergrad. And I've I've enjoyed sort of the culture through martial arts and
all these other things that I've done. And their response was kind of like,
you can't make a career out of that. And I was like, OK, you're not wrong.
What a great advice to like a 20 year old who could do anything.
Yeah, it was it was certainly well-intentioned in the most poorly sort of executed statement.
Right. I mean, like I get it right. It's it's if you if you if a really smart
college kid comes up to me and they were like, oh, I kind of want to live abroad. And
I don't know, like just that. And then I'll be like, maybe think about what you would do
there, you know, instead of just like, go ahead. But I don't know. I would probably just say go
ahead if they're that young. Yeah. Yeah. That's certainly where I find myself now. Right. I mean,
I was I was more susceptible to that at the time. Right. And, you know, I had plenty of support to
be like, you know, yeah, go ahead and like do grad school stuff. Nowadays, when people ask,
you know, should I go to grad school or something equivalent? My response is usually like, do you
have a reason you want to go to grad school? Because otherwise, no, absolutely not. You know,
do not go. Yeah, we should definitely talk about that, you know, to or to not do grad school type
of discussion in some whole other episode, we can probably talk about it for like hours. But so
OK, so you always had that like idea of moving abroad and maybe specifically Japan.
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And after with your newly minted Ph.D., you're like, why not now? Yeah, that was that was almost
exactly the sentiment. Right. OK. It was I was having a great time with all of the people that
I was connected with right in Providence. I didn't necessarily want to leave. But the the next stage
was sort of in front of me and it seemed like, well, this would be, you know, as good a time as
any to to take up that opportunity. Right. So. Yeah. So I figured, yeah. And now you're in your
third year in Japan. Yes. Yeah. This would be. Yeah. Two. So it was 20. What year is it? 2024
now. And it was twenty twenty one in the fall when I arrived, I think. Yeah. So almost almost
three years. Yeah. Yeah. Almost almost three years. Wow. So. Yeah. So it was two years of teaching
English at a high school. And now there was a great opportunity to to move into a, you know,
an upper level position. Right. So I was able to find an international department at a university
that gave me a professor title and said, here, go teach some some undergrads. And, you know,
and it's been it's been quite the change of pace. That was that's most recent. So it's only been
about a month and change. So. Yeah, that's true. And I do probably want to dedicate
possibly another episode on how that transition has going on. Just sprinkling ideas into the space.
Yeah. I mean, I mean, this, this, this, this episode and the next episode is just going to be
sort of our brainstorming session on the semi-public wavelength. So.
Yeah. So I recruited Len as our new host because, well, for those who have been listening to this
podcast from the beginning, they know that I started this podcast. And I don't know if you
know, Len, I don't know if I have actually told this to you, but I initially started this podcast
because I couldn't go home to Japan due to COVID for like three years. And what I really missed
the most when during that time was this English, Japanese mishmash conversation that I typically
have with my friends in Japan who speak English, like who are bilinguals, because I had Japanese
friends here, like in the place we did the grad school at. But. Like they were obviously more
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comfortable with Japanese, most of them. And while we did mix English here and there, it was
primarily Japanese conversation with them. And then there was nobody else who could speak Japanese
other than the Japanese people. So I was just, you know, naturally limited to only speaking Japanese
or only speaking English. And then what I realized I missed the most is this like mixing back and
forth. And that plus me realizing that the podcast is a relatively new market in Japan,
and that you don't yet need to have a fancy production team and like composers and,
you know, fact checkers to do your own podcasts. And still, I found several like really good
quality shows. And yeah, I was just kind of like, maybe like, I can just, you know, get my toes wet
with this and like, see how this goes. And voila, it's been one year. And I, it's actually been
pretty interesting, meeting different people through collaborations. And for me, just the
act of talking about science in Japanese is already an interesting experience, because
okay, yeah, I haven't really done that. Yeah, yeah.
So Masako was a great, like, in between, you know, like, I, like, could talk about science,
could also speak in English and Japanese. She was equally comfortable with both of them. So
we started doing this and kind of hit like, we like, I don't know, like, success is a different,
you know, metric to it. But I kind of success that we can even continue this for like a year.
I think so.
And that there are actual people listening to this from like, simple math calculation,
because I only get, I only get analytics from Spotify. So I don't know, the Apple podcast and
everything else. I just have a rough estimate. But based on that, there's like, 300, 400 active
listeners, who are like listening to almost every episode, when they get posted, which is insane to
me. So cool. Yeah, like, I know that compared to things like YouTube, or TikTok, these numbers are
a lot smaller, because podcast just is not like the big platform yet. And adding to that, like,
I am releasing an English, mostly English speaking podcast in Japanese market, that limits
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to like a whole lot of people only. And, and I'm not doing any marketing, just like my humble little
Twitter, and X, I guess. Yeah. And where I don't really tweet, because I don't know how to tweet.
I mainly just respond to other podcasters, podcasts episode and like, tell them what I
liked about that episode, because now I learned that it's nice to get those feedback.
When you put yourself out there, because especially podcasts is not very conducive to feedback loop,
as a medium, like, there's no comment section. I mean, Spotify is trying to do that. But I don't
know if anyone's actually using the Spotify comment structure in a meaningful way.
And at least in Japan, there's seems to be mostly in the like, the podcast discussion happens on
Twitter. And I know that's not everybody who, like, listens to podcast that also has a Twitter account.
True. Yeah.
Yeah. All of this to say, I just wanted to speak English and Japanese mishmash,
and Masako was there. And then when Masako couldn't do it, I just tried to think of someone
who can do English and Japanese. And I know you're learning Japanese. So hello, Len.
What a transition right there. That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us on
X at Eigo de Science. That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. See you next time.
