00:11
All right, hello Masako. Hello Asami.
All right, so this is another time of the month again where we're doing the monthly,
we've been pretty consistent about this one, monthly 科学系ポッドキャストの予言というテーマで今回はお送りいたします。
This time around, our host is Tatsu-san and Yurika-san from 奏でる細胞へというポッドキャスト。 Music Science Podcast というポッドキャストです。
I found this podcast through Science Mania and he was a guest, Tatsu-san was a guest at the Science
Mania and he researches about the cell signaling and the rhythms and how cells communicate with
one another at a certain frequency. If I got this correctly, I'm just pulling this out of my
memory. So that's why it's like the music of the cell, the music of the science.
You know, the cells are singing or I don't know, dancing, whichever one you kind of call it.
I think it's quite nice and they're both a fan of classical music. So in earlier season,
the first season, they had a co-host who is a conductor.
Also in Indiana from the United States and they had some interesting sort of music science crossover
talks about the rhythms of the cells and rhythm of the musics and sometimes the rhythm of life
and such. So if you haven't listened to it, have a listen. I really enjoyed it. I have like,
yeah, like a soft spot for, you know, anyone who is, any Japanese researcher who is there
in the world, far away from their families and, you know, doing their thing.
But anyway, so he suggested the topic of Yogen. So, yeah, it's kind of
ominous, don't you think? The topic, it's like,
it almost could be a New Year resolution episode, but the Yogen just makes it sound more,
03:06
you know, it has to be profound kind of thing. I don't know. I didn't really know initially what
to talk about, but then again, it's not like, I don't really believe in New Year's resolution,
to be honest. I feel like you should just start it any time of the year. You shouldn't wait for
the first of January to start your resolution. So I don't really subscribe to that thought,
but again, I guess it doesn't really matter. There's no timeline, you know, it's not like something
that should be achieved within a year. It's just wild prediction, or that's how I interpret it,
the word Yogen. So I loosely started thinking about what I usually think about, which is
crossover of science. And since our podcast is about English, technically.
Yeah, we haven't done a lot of educational content. Not really.
But yeah, so it's English, you know, science. And then also the podcast is a medium, I think,
is particularly interesting in Japanese podcast market. So I just started thinking about, you know,
the overlap of the three or of the two of the three. And yeah, I don't really know where
we're gonna go with it, but bear with me. So I think that English podcast is a fairly straightforward
relational elements. And, you know, already, there are a bunch of like,
Eigo Benkyou Shiyoukei podcast out there. So I don't think there's going to be anything new there.
However, I do feel like there's a room for younger audience, like kids,
small children, like preschool, or maybe like, lower elementary school age kids,
they grew up with screens. You know, you've Have you seen those like little like three year olds
knowing how to zoom? Oh, yeah, scroll. And, and while that's all right, you know, you know, every
every generation has that kind of, you know, new toys to play with, right. But I do feel like we're
kind of at the saturation point of, you know, what new technology we can give to our children. And
and we already don't really know the long term effect of what it's like to grow up with this
06:04
many screens. And, you know, essentially, yeah, supercomputer at your fingertip. So I, I think it's
this is not to sort of ban the screens or any means, but I think a lot of parents are interested
in reducing the screen time whenever they can, because, you know, sometimes they do want to watch,
I don't know, like Dora the Explorer, or power patrols. And that's, that's all,
that's the only thing that they're gonna, you know, take it in that minute. But for other times,
like, if you're just trying to make the kid sit still for a little while, or pay attention to
something. Yeah. I think audio medium is relatively unexplored area. Because I think kids can be
easily stimulated with just audio, not, you know, it doesn't have to come with the visual elements.
In fact, for most kids, like if they're seeing, like if they have the ability to see things,
I think, for most of the waking time, they're just always seeing that switch is always on.
And whereas hearing might be might take a little bit more conscious choice to pay attention to.
And when I think about my hearing ability, and particularly sort of English,
like language acquisition way, right. So the reason why I and my sister also
retained pretty accent free English, as of now, even though we only really started
being immersed in English environment, when I was 14, and she was 13. You know,
you know, that's fairly late in life. Like, we only started doing that, the 100% English world
from that age. Before that, we just did the regular amount of English like any other kids in the
school. And, but because of our early year exposures, in the mix language, that we went,
because that was the only options. One of the few options where you were able to learn Japanese
as a Youqian set when we were in Singapore, in the 90s. So we went to this like mixed
language Youqian, where we did like, Japanese and English, and maybe Mandarin, I don't really
remember. But that's when we were like, three or four. Okay, you had a very early age exposures to
English language. Yeah, because we were still in Singapore at the time. But it wasn't, you know,
09:00
at home, it's 100% Japanese. And it was just a few hours at Youqian that we like, you know,
sing a song or like, made cookies or something like that. I honestly don't remember what I did
as a Youqian. And then you came back to Japan. And then we went back to Singapore again.
Again, at 14. So, and then you were re-exposed to the, like a full English environment. Yeah.
So, but we had that early exposure when we were very little. And that, I think, at least for
English, because this clearly didn't help in terms of Mandarin. I don't know how to speak
Mandarin at all. But in terms of English, there was re-exposure. So yeah, so there was a super
early exposure. I think that might have been beneficial in your case, right? It might have.
Right. It might have. And, and it's, it was, it was not necessarily that it helped us learn
English better, really. I think, I think we had the same level of struggle in listening ability
when we were re-exposed to English. Like we had to start from like, what is this person saying?
Yeah. So it's not like our sort of early exposed ears helped us in comprehending English.
But perceptually, I mean, subjectively. Yeah. Yeah. But we both knew that our pronunciation
was pretty decent. And I think that gave us a little boost of confidence that,
that is much needed when you're learning something new. And, and I feel like it...
Yes, because people won't look at you like, what are you saying or anything because your
pronunciation is good. Exactly. I mean, they still do like have a funny face about it because,
you know, we'll probably mess up the grammar or something. And it doesn't, you know, make us
mistake proof by any means. But just because we knew that like 80% of the time our pronunciation
was legible and comprehensive, we were able to be a bit more confident in that super early stage,
very, very early stage of English speaking. And I think, and I don't think you need to go to mixed
language kindergarten to do that. I think you can just do that at home anywhere, just play some
English radio show, podcast, whatever. And it's already a thing in sort of English speaking world
of podcasts where like there are specific contents for small children. And it's not just like audio
books of children's book. It's, it's, it's like a TV show or like any podcast that we adults listen
12:03
to. It just, you know, designed more for kids. And it's free, right? You don't have to pay.
Yeah. And it's, and it's free and it's, you know, the new content shows up every week or something.
And again, this is probably propelled by the fact that most of America spends a lot of time
in car every day. So it's easy to sort of, you know, put that on and make them listen maybe,
I guess. But I do think that more of that should come about in Japanese podcast world
and not necessarily just English teaching contents in Japanese like podcast marketing,
just, just straight up Japanese kids, like kids oriented contents for podcasts.
Maybe it's already happening. I just don't know about it. I feel like,
you know, there should be more of that from, I don't know, like eat it. It took a, like
that kind of, you know, people who know what they're doing with the developmental psychology
people. And, and I think in the, in like a hard to quantify level, I think it helps kids
comprehend, like with the reading comprehension, but like listening comprehension. I think it uses
a different part of the brain when you're listening and understanding the story versus
reading and understanding a story. I used to be a lot more reading oriented person.
I used to not be able to listen to words when it's spoken to me. But ever since I started
listening to a bunch of podcasts, my audio processing skill is so much better. I retain
more information, still not as good as when I'm reading it, but I can sort of process. I don't
have to turn off all the other perception in order to focus on the audio. So if you start that young,
I think that can only help. And also music, early exposure to music, I think is super
beneficial for every kid, whether it's rhythm or the colors of music or very subtle differences,
musical expressions. And I think it's one of the, you know, sort of creative contents that
humans have enjoyed for so long. I mean, basically ever since we figured out how to
make sound, right? So I think it's only nice if you can get quality, like high quality musical
contents for kids, especially of that kind of preschool, lower elementary school age kids.
15:04
So that's one. I was just thinking about podcasts and that like that just went from podcast to
English, to podcast and music and I don't know, whatever. But so then I went to think about
what about science and podcasts? And of course, you know, we, this is, this is, this Kalegakkei
Podcast is already sort of part of it, right? We're trying to do, trying to sort of decimate
scientific information, scientific methods and thoughts, share that with the audience through
audio. And I think it comes with the unique challenges because a lot of us communicate
through figures, articles, figures. Yeah. We look at graphs, we look at, you know, maps,
contours, that type of thing. So it's really hard to convey accurate information through audio.
But if you cannot accurate, like if accuracy is not the main concern, what can we do
with audio that is not maybe easily accessible with journal articles? Yeah, that was just sort
of like unanswered question that I popped in my head. Yeah. You proposed, I don't know, last time
or recently that, the idea that, about the paper introduction, right? Yeah. Yeah. I, after you
proposed that idea, I had a thought and I thought it's really interesting and I think we should,
we should do it. As you said, yeah, as you said, they're, you know, difficult. They could,
there should be difficulties in how to explain the papers without any visual, you know, elements.
Yeah, because as a field, we rely so much on the visual communication. Yeah. But I think, you know,
basically, even without figures, we do discuss daily, right, about scientific findings and stuff.
And I think it will be a good opportunity for us to summarize even the field, like the findings in
the fields that we are not really, you know, specialized, right? So I think what I'd like to do,
like hope to do, is to kind of introduce some papers that are not really
relevant to our fields, to my field, but one interested me. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's,
18:03
I don't know if you can call this your game, but one of my hopes, if I could. Oh, okay. I like
that. Yeah, I like that. Well, that sounds more like a resolution, like the more cure than a
your game. But I think, I think that's good. I think, I think it's always good to challenge
our communication skills as scientists. And I think the longer you do it, sort of you get into
a habit of the same sort of tricks up your sleeves. Exactly. Yeah. And to just spice things up,
I think it's good to try and test our ability on how to communicate better through audio means,
no visual aids. And that's also, you know, now that the world is moving more towards inclusivity
and accessibility, it's only natural that we think about these things, because science is not just
for people who can see and read, you know, it should be for everyone. And it's up to us to
sort of go that extra mile and make that inviting to people who are otherwise not welcomed
in the past. So I think podcast has a lot of potential in that regard. And
but it's also the dilemma of that is that if you try to make a high quality, high
information content, science podcast, you do need like a team of people working for you.
We don't have that. Exactly. We don't have that. And I don't think that's our podcast role.
No. But in future, as a Yogen, this is a part, I would love to see professional production team
with fact checkers, with research team, like, you know, three or four research people per episode.
And ideally, they, you know, they have maybe like 15 to 20 people all together as a research team
who each cover slightly different scientific topics. And that reminded me of the time when I
worked briefly with Ted, Ed, like education version of Ted. Yeah, we made a video together.
And there was this team of fact checking team. Exactly. Yeah. And also, it was they were so,
so smart. All the parts, different parts, like a audio team, animation team. Also,
in the first place, they received this story making team, like a draft making team.
Yeah, people who actually come up with the with the daihon, right? Because we don't do that.
21:02
But we do. I do that because it was based on a scientific project.
Not for our project. No, no, no, no, no, no, not this. Yeah. So there was amazing, like,
teams with great people. And, and there was a, you know, just a part of the team,
there was a fact checking, you know, people who are responsible for that part.
Yeah. So I think, in future, we will see more of that professionalization of podcast productions,
much like how YouTube is actually a full on production, you know, industry,
content creation industry, it's no longer an industry where like a random guy in the basement
of their parents place, like making videos about the games he's playing, it's no longer that there,
they exist, there's a space for that, too. But more often than not, it's a whole team of people
working, editing, and producing the content, like coming up with the daihon, coming up with the new
kikaku and all of that stuff. So I think we will eventually see more of that in podcasts and also
in Japanese podcast world. Because I think still a lot of Japanese market for podcasts is a lot of
amateurs, like us, which is what makes it fun. I like those. But I also, and a lot of the
professionally produced podcasts are kind of just transcription of radio show that already exists.
Or people who, it's like a spinoff of a radio show where like, it's done by people whose profession
is to speak in front of people. And like, they do the podcast, which is like, you know,
not that much of a stretch for them. But what I want to see is more directly from the science field,
where people who actually do the research coming up with one. And I think the first step might be
university wide podcast, like universities have or research institute, right? They always have
like a press team who do the press release. And I think it'll be fun if some of the people there
start doing professional productions of podcasts and sort of explore what is a room for science
in podcast world. Because I do think it reveals, even though it's a challenge in one way, it also,
our voices carry different information, like how excited we get, when you were talking about
certain things. Those are like harder to convey in a written format, right? And we can just,
24:02
I think the passion and enthusiasm is conveyed better through voice. And I think that would work
really well with sort of science communication purposes. So I want to, I think I personally want
to see more of it. I think we will see more of that in future. So that was science and podcast.
And the last overlap is science and English. And it's funny, because, you know, we've been
working on that for a long time, I think, as a non-native English speaking country,
which is most of the world, by the way. But I still, at least just sort of like a personal
anecdotal level, you know, I don't have a statistics in mind, but personal anecdotal level, I feel like
there's a lot of untapped potential, or like unexposed talents that are like stuck in sort of
like a national level rather than international level, because of this cultural barrier.
And cultural barrier is not just overcomable with English, right? There are a lot more layers
to that. Understanding each other's history is one, understanding cultural custom is one,
and English is only like one part of it. But it does open up a whole lot of doors,
you know? And I think it helps in collaboration, it makes the collaboration way more efficient and
enjoyable to everyone involved. And it's a shame if, you know, someone who's perfectly capable
and talented don't really want to sort of explore the world because, you know, he or she is more
comfortable being in a setting in Japan. And I'm not to say that you shouldn't be stuck in Japan,
like that's not what I mean, obviously. But especially for young people, if there were
opportunities, I think they should take it no matter what. And it would be easier to take
that risk if English is not one of your concerns. And I think Japan as a country already has
a lot of resources for language learning, you know? Most of us have access to internet,
most of us have access to English teaching sort of resources. And I don't know why
it's still, like, I still get comments from people I meet here. Like, I tell them about my research,
you know, it's the first time I've seen them. I tell them about my research, where I work,
whatever. And I, you know, they ask me where I'm from or, like, they say, oh, Asami, that name
27:03
sounds like Japanese. And I was like, yeah, I'm from Japan. And they're always, like, 95% of the
time, they have to comment, like, whoa, your English is so good. And I'm so tired of hearing
that. Like, it should not come as a surprise. I'm like, you know, I always say, oh, thank you.
Or like, oh, yeah, I spent a lot of my time outside of Japan. But like, you know, it shouldn't
come as a surprise. Like, some people when some people are so impressed by that. And,
and I want them to focus on the research, not the fact that I can do English.
So, clearly, government has not done a very good job in terms of decimating 義務教育
that gives confidence and the baseline technique like for English learning.
Yeah. So I guess people have to, you know, teach themselves like they cannot rely on schools and
I think one of the best ways to learn any language is through something that you're
interested in. And I think science, if you're a scientist, you're most likely quite interested
in science, or at least the topic of your research. And, and that's a great getaway to
a gateway, not getaway, gateway in into into a whole information that's available in English
outside. And so I want people to like, utilize that a lot more. And I, I, I just feel like
through podcast, yeah, I feel like there's gotta be a better way either if the if the government's
not going to do it, the university or high school needs to do a better job, like schools
or individuals or mentors, they need to do a better job to encourage kids to learn English
and excite them, right? Because if, if kids are excited, they have all the time in the world,
like, they'll, they'll figure out what to do with it. I think, I think it's, it's just that
they see adults struggling. And they see, they just think that it's something they have to do,
rather than as a tool that, like, oh, I can, I have suddenly realized that 95% of the internet
is in English. And now I have the whole, like, wide world to think about, or when they realize
the joy of being able to read your favorite books or movies in the original language,
and actually compare how good the translation is, like, that's a really fun thing to be able to do.
30:03
Yeah. And I, you know, for me, I'm very lucky, right? Like, I just sort of circumstantially
was in a great place at a great time to, I mean, I did have to work hard, but like, it was,
you know, a 14 year old me who worked hard. And like, I kind of forgot how hard it was at this
point. Like, so I'm always sort of aware of sort of the privilege that I have in when it comes to
this. But this level of English is attainable by a lot more people. And I don't want people to
be impressed by my English anymore. Like, be impressed by the science that I'm doing, you know,
not about my English. So that was that. So that's the English and science overlap part.
And I guess our little humble podcast is sort of trying to marry all three of them together.
And yeah, in a very unprofessional, but like, hopefully, a more accessible and relatable.
We can encourage. Yeah, we can encourage some people that this level of conversation
is okay. I talked about this in an episode that I think is out already by the time this episode
comes out. But yeah, like, you know, when I say I edit this podcast, I really only just sync
our audios together, stuff some music before and after. And that's really like, I don't take away
the mistakes that we make, incorrect grammar, imperfect pronunciations. I tend to leave them
in consciously. Because, yeah, I mean, like, there's a reason why we're not sponsored by
NHK. We don't have to worry about those things. If we're getting paid, maybe we should care about it.
But like, nah, this is just for us to have fun. It's okay. I think we get to decide on the quality
control level of our podcast productions. But yeah, so that's just sort of the... So I had
several yogens in there. I'm kind of like, I'm thinking as I speak. So I'm like, not recalling
everything, right? I guess I have to listen to it again. What I said to talk about it. But yeah,
so I don't know if it's I don't think it's achievable in a year. So it's not a resolution
of the year. But I'm very excited to see long term. Yeah, long term yogen in general. And maybe
33:01
it'll be fun to revisit this episode, like a few years down the road and be like, Oh,
some of that came through. Yeah. 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. See you next time.
