Chat between Brazilian Researchers and Brazilian Embassy

A nice afternoon chat between Brazilian Researchers in Japan and Brazilian Embassy in Japan.

Today I had a meeting with the other Brazilian researchers and professors based in Japan. Including an old friend, like Prof. Claus who is a fellow student in Tokyo, and now is based in Tsukuba. The motivation of the meeting is to strengthen ties between the research community in Japan and the embassy, and was attended also by the Brazilian Ambassador Eduardo Saboia.

We could not deviate from the topic of the COVID-19 and how it is affecting researchers and students during their study period in Japanese universities. Later we discussed ways of increasing the number of researchers here, as well as ways of coordinate this community towards to show to the Brazilian community in Japan how we help Japan by improving science.

Gabriela Resendes from the embassy organized the meeting, and I find it very exciting that our embassy took the liberty to start this discussion. I hope we continue these discussion calls in the future, and eventually we could organize a small conference or workshop with the several branches of science that there are Brazilians working here.

I am particularly interested in showing to all Brazilian communities in Japan that we have several Brazilians working with science and technology here. It seems that not so many of our countrymen know about that. In particular, the little Brazilian children growing here. Once I had been asked, to my surprise, in one of my classes by a Brazilian student when he discovered I am Brazilian: “Oh, is there many Brazilians working with technology here? I thought there isn’t many…”

I believe we can change that by showing our (academic) example, and I am glad that, apparently, the embassy noticed that too.

The Participants

On the side of the Embassy

• Gabriel Resendes
• Leandro Napolitano
• Camilo Prates
• Francisco Cannabrava
• Eduardo Saboia

On the side of researchers:

• Claus Aranha
• Ingrid Lima
• Marcos Masukawa
• Myself