Successful exchange with Kyoto University

In October 2025, Simon Dahlberg at the Department of Genetic Engineering at KTH, travelled to Kyoto to work in a research group led by Professor Hirofumi Shintaku. Dahlberg had contacted the group through his supervisor Ian Hoffecker, who completed his PhD at Kyoto University. 

“Simon has been working with Professor Shintaku to develop a new network-based imaging technology for transcriptomic analysis. The exchange was the first step in a long-term collaboration that will involve further exchanges over the coming years,” Hoffecker says.  

Fascinating homemade contraptions 

He goes on to explain that Professor Shintaku is an innovator and runs a laboratory filled with fascinating homemade devices and gadgets that would make any engineer jealous. It is the same institute where Shimon Sakaguchi, the 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, worked for many years.  

“Most people in the Shintaku lab work in biomechanics, and many of the members actually have a background closer to mechanics than biology,” Simon Dahlberg explains.  

As well as the stimulating research environment, Dahlberg appreciated the Japanese food and the natural surroundings of Kyoto. He spent many weekends hiking in the countryside around the city or in the mountains. For lunch, he bought bento boxes from the local vendor who came to the lab with his cart every day. 

Long working hours  

The biggest difference compared to Sweden was the language, says Dahlberg. Although everyone in the research group spoke good English, Google Translate was the go-to tool in everyday life. Another major difference from home was the Japanese work culture.  

“Many in the group were in the office until very late in the evening almost every day, both professors and students, which was probably the most immediately noticeable difference. It’s also not unusual to work on Saturdays,” Dahlberg says. 

Despite the hard work involved, he strongly encourages other doctoral students to give an exchange in Japan a go.  

“Japan is so different from Sweden that living there was a fantastic experience, even if it was only for three months. I can definitely recommend doing an exchange there, but it’s important to find a good group and have some idea of what expectations there are on both sides. I’m very glad I was able to go and visit the Shintaku lab and found that they had a lovely atmosphere and were doing very interesting research.”

Jon Lindhe ( jlindhe@kth.se )

Simon’s tips for a trip to Japan

Dahlberg’s most-used app was probably Google Lens; being able to take a photo and translate the text in the image was extremely useful, and made everyday tasks feel a bit less like a blind adventure.  

Having a basic grasp of Katakana was quite useful. In Japan, they have three types of characters, of which Katakana are the ones most often used for loanwords. Text in Katakana is often an English word, written using Japanese characters and therefore phonetically similar. If you know those characters, you can quite often make out simpler signs and menus when they aren’t in English.  

In Japan, cash is still king. Although you can often get by with cards in the cities, it was more common to see ‘no cards accepted’ than ‘no cash accepted’, especially when venturing further out into the countryside.