I was born in Osaka, Japan and attended Marist Brothers' Internatinal School in the neighboring port city of Kobe where my family relocated soon after I was born. After finishing high school in 1982, I worked for my family's real estate company in Osaka for ten years. Among the cities that I have visited, I have never seen a place more beautiful than Kobe with its fine seaport, diverse ethnicity, clean neighborhoods, great shopping malls and easy access to the commercial city of Osaka to the east. Although Kobe suffered a devastating earthquake in 1997, the city quicky recovered and became more modern as new buildings and municipal parks were made during the reconstruction period.

I returned to school in Fall, 1992 and earned an undergraduate degree in physics from the Department of Physics & Astronomy, Univeristy of Pennsylvania in 1998. (I was at Penn for 6 years, both studying and working) My interest was neutrino oscillation and I was fortunate to enter a promising field.

I was a member of the experimental high energy physics group in which Dr. Ray Davis was once actively involved. In particular, I worked with electronics and data aquisition for the SNO Group headed by Dr. E. Beier. I also had a pleasant opportunity to meet Dr. M. Koshiba (also here, in Japanese)who visited UPenn in 1997. It was these experiences that made me enter this field which was considered the most active area in experimental physics.

In Fall of 2004, I was accepted to the Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa. It was a great opportunity and also a privilege to work with leaders in particle astrophysics, such as Dr. J.G. Learned who was a pioneer and an expert in this field. I eventually hope to work in this area if everything works out well.

In elementary school, I spent my free time building plastic models and listening to shortwave radio stations. In the 1970's, BCL(Broadcast Listener) was a popular pastime in Japan, thanks to local electronic companies wishing to sell their transistor radios. It was a common practice in those days to collect postcards of shortwave stations around the world, such as BBC, Voice of America, AFRTS, Radio Moscow and Voice of the Andes.

I also enjoyed reading - a skill that I never stopped polishing since I was small. I have a wide range of reading interests from science to popular books and some of my most memorable books are Cosmos by Carl Sagan and Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan. Aside science books and Carl Sagan jokes, I love to read travel guidebooks because I fly often -- mostly to the US mainland and countries in the Asia Pacific Rim. One day, I'm looking forward to visit Europe, a place that eluded me all my life.

At the present moment, I try to keep myself busy with computers. I was introduced to the internet (WWW Mosaic) back in 1993 and have been teaching myself HTML, Javascript and C after I bought my first Dell computer in 1998. In addition to programming, there was a time when I seriously allocated a considerable amount of time and energy in learning Linux Server administration and networking. I began with TurboLinuxJ, moved on to Red Hat Linux7.3 and ended up with Red Hat Fedora Core2. On the lighter side, I love to surf on the net to find rare and interesting sites -- those places where few people know but containing unusual information. Some sites I visit are power generating dams, wind power, renewable energies, North Korean subways and locomotives, urban trams, and military aviation. In the past, I frequently visited the discussion board of Princeton Review, although I haven't visited the forum recently.

Aside computers and surfing on the net, I go to local bookstores or take a stroll in Waikiki Beach whenever I'm free. However, it's hard to find a lot of time right now.