00:12
Today, we have a big news for A.S.I.N.I.T.O.
We have a new host is the big news.
Masako 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 labs afloat. Obviously, she should prioritize that.
Here you are, Len. We have Len.
Do you want to introduce yourself?
Sure, I can introduce myself.
A stressful endeavor, but a necessary one.
I wish her all the best with dealing with that.
You actually met Masako too, right?
Yeah, I did. Many years ago at this point.
Many moons ago at this point.
A couple of exchanges here and there.
I certainly feel for her sort of situation.
It's not an easy one to be in, but as a PI of a lab,
it's certainly one of the responsibilities you take on.
I guess I can do a little introduction.
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.
Len or the L-R sound that I cannot perfectly grasp is entirely fine.
They're good enough between the two.
You would rather go by Len than Leonard.
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 two years ago,
which I can introduce as background later.
Really?
Yes.
The response I got when somebody asked me for my name the first time was like,
It was just so long.
It filled either the boxes they were in or they were...
And just like get into a single syllable.
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, but my full name does it.
03:01
Yeah, your full name is too much.
Yeah, my full name is 777 and then an additional 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.
Yeah, so I mentioned that I came here two years ago.
I finished up a PhD program as well in the same sort of program department as you.
And that's where we had met.
It was also during that time that I had met Misako.
And since then, I sort of shifted my direction.
I did a lot of computational chemistry work back in grad school.
That was entirely sort of a 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 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.
Giving 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 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 a...
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.
What you could do with the PhD that doesn't directly have anything to do with the research.
06:02
Exactly. It's the idea of that whole transitional or transferable skill sets.
That was part of the searching, right?
So, you get anything from, well, you could join finance to, well, you could become a baker.
And these are all entirely valid.
Two very valid options.
Yep. One more delicious than the other.
But, yeah. 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 US.
I didn't know that.
Yeah. 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 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 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, okay, you're not wrong.
What a great advice to like, what, a 20 year old who could do anything?
It was certainly well-intentioned in the most poorly sort of executed statement, right?
I mean, like, I get it, right?
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.
Instead of just like, go ahead.
But I don't know, I would probably just say go ahead if they're that young.
Yeah, that's certainly where I find myself now, right?
I mean, 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, like, absolutely not.
You know, do not go.
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, okay.
So you always had that, like, idea of moving abroad and maybe specifically Japan.
09:07
And after with your newly minted Ph.D., you're like, why not now?
Yeah, that was that was almost exactly the sentiment.
Right. Okay.
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 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 2021 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 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, 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 comfortable with Japanese, most of them.
12:03
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 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 fact checkers to do your own podcast.
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 it's been one year and 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 I haven't really done that yet.
So Masako was a great like in between, you know, like I 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.
And that there are actual people listening to this from like simple math calculation.
Because 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 three, four hundred active listeners who are like listening to almost every episode when they get posted, which is insane to me.
Yeah, that's 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 to like a whole lot of people only.
15:10
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 podcast 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 seems to be mostly in the podcast discussion happens on Twitter.
And I know that's not everybody who 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.
This is basically what happened.
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.
