Hej!

This page is for me to ventilate my impressions and feelings about my life in Tokyo, the place where I will be living for the next few years. How I ended up going to Japan? It's a long story. Let's say it started with Judo and continued with Japanese language studies, though always as a hobby. My interest in Japan got a boost from staying in Osaka as an exchange student for one year. And I've had this idea about going back to Japan for some time now.

What about the name in the URL? Well, Carl Peter Thunberg was a Swedish botanic and student of Carl von Linné, who you might know of. In 1770 he went out on a journey that took him from Uppsala in Sweden to South Africa and then all the way to Nagasaki in Japan. The journey lasted for 9 years and during this time he collected and catalogued a huge number of plants. He wrote a book based on what he had found, Flora Japonica, and this work became the first scientific exchange between Sweden and Japan. That was 240 years ago.

I am a graduate student at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden and I will do a part of my research at the University of Tokyo. Though I hold no dreams of having the same impact on science as Thunberg had, I am happy to continue this long history of scientific exchange. Hopefully it will continue for another 240 years!

I plan to write often and short. Quantity instead of quality..erhm? We'll see how it goes. Since my situation will be that of a normal Japanese college student I guess I won't spend much time outside of the lab, eat all my meals in the school canteen and use my 13m2 room for nothing but sleeping.

Believe it or not, I'm actually looking forward to this a lot!