I studied theoretical physics in Kyoto Univ., Faculty of Science. I am now an experimentist, however, I was wishing to be a theorist until I realized the situation of biophysics that biophysics needs a lot more experimental results until we construct the theoretical explanation. I started my biophysics career in Dep. of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Univ. of Tokyo. I enjoyed nice days in Ikegami Laboratory whose field is membrane biophysics. I chose the field of membrane, because brain consists of many membrane structures, due to a very simple reason. My colleages were Kinoshita / Kanehisa / Mitaku / Kukita / Kataoka/ Kimura / Furuno who are now good / famous? professors and researchers. Atmosphere was free, not rigid. People enjoyed their own interests mainly on phase transition of membrane and fluctuation of globular protein. Students of Wada / Ebashi / Hotta Lab. were also working around us. We enjoyed table tennis in mid night. Nanobiology is now a hot topic, and 20 years ago I already studied a lot of nanosecond dynamics of lipids in membranes with Dr. Kinosita using time-resolved fluorescence anisotropy methods.
I worked over 3 years as an instructor (assistent in German) at ETH-Zurich (Federal Institute of Technology), Laboratory of Biochemistry, Switzerland. I worked in Cherry's Lab. and I also collaborated with Prof. C. Richter, Prof. E. Carafoli, Prof.K.H. Winterhalter, P.D. J. Krebs, Prof. M. Hein. Rotation of membrane proteins was a leading-edge topic at that time, and we were leading this field using pulsed laser-induced absorption anisotropy spectroscopy. People are working hard and punktual like Japanese.I really enjoyed not only scientific work but also private discussions with my colleages. Though many European people are afraied about Swiss people as cool, narrow minded, strict (generally speaking it is right), I was happy talking and working with gentle Ph.D. students Arne Burkli / Josef Gut / Michele Muller / Carmen Zugliani. Zurich is really crowded in small area, expensive like Tokyo, when comapred with U.S. or Canada. Poor cooking when you compare with Italy, for example.
When I was working in ERATO project which was sponsered by National Research Developing Corporation, I was impressed by development of new microscopic imaging for Ca signaling with Dr. Miyamoto / Toyotama. Since then, I have been working at Univ. of Tokyo at Komaba about membrane and cell biophysics with time-resolved spectroscopy.
Private hobbies: Karaoke singing. Especially with foreign guests scientists at farewell / welcome party. I might be better at singing English songs than them. Person from belaruss was impressed very much and sent e-mail about an excited forrible night. Reading cartoon books. more than 4 books per week. Recently, TV drama and movies are often made from cartoon stories. I know, therefore, stories of TV dramas and movies better than my family. Of course, reading academic books, too. I often, in free time, spent time just imaging new scientific idea or experiments. Talking with drinking alchols. sake / wisky / beer / wine. I enjoy not quantity but atmosphare. Teaching foreign scientists about Japanese culture, high-tech, karaoke. Concerning maltimedia, karaoke image computing system and cartoon stories are representative super technologies of Japan, though Japanese people are wondering about many weak points of communication technology due to rigid rules of the society. I should stress that our cartoon stories treat socially important problems, high-techs, philosophycal and psychological investigations of human characters. Recently goverment supports to publish cartoon books treating Japanese economic miracle, high-tech industries, because with a lot of illustrations you can easily understand what is going on. Unfortunately, Japanese actors / actresses are not accepted well internationally compared with Hollywood Movies. However, animation characters of neutral and smart looking and high-tech robots are well accepted and appeared in European and American TV dramas. Haidi, Gooren-jyar, Sailer Moon ?