My Journey to Kyoto
(by Iris Reinbacher)

I left Austria in 2002. I had just finished my masters in mathematics, but wasn’t ready to join the workforce, so I accepted a PhD position in the computer science department at Utrecht University. Four years later, and now “officially smart”, settling down was still the last thing on my mind. At that time, I gave myself a time horizon of some five years “to have adventures abroad” before returning to Europe and leading the serious life of an adult.

For me, the most adventurous place to go was Asia, and I was invited to a PostDoc position in HongKong. It was summer 2007 when I first set foot onto Japan, and into Kyodai for a conference. And I visited again, for another conference, later in December. To be honest, Japan was not one of these crazy “love at first sight” things for me. I liked it here, the people, the atmosphere, but there was no Big Bang. However, in the next five years I visited Japan a total of 14 times, partly for business, partly for pleasure. I travelled between Otaru and Fukuoka, between Kamakura and Niigata, and in 2012, I spent all my holidays in Japan. By that time, I had long dreamed of living in Japan one day, and when I made the big decision later that year to leave academia for good, I thought that I could just as well reinvent myself in the place I wanted to be – in Japan. In Kyoto, to be precise, because it is the most Japanese of all cities.

Beyond that, there was no big plan regarding housing, job, or anything else. I lived in a gaijin house near Kyodai, and spent my first year in Kyoto doing all the cheesy touristy things with a big smile on my face – after all, I made it to Japan! Still, I had to get serious eventually, and finding a job in my field proved surprisingly difficult. By now I know that smaller companies are more open to hire people with only basic Japanese, but the lack of employment made me set up my own company, and a bit later the What’s up in Kyoto event calendar was born.

It happened simply out of my own needs, since I got frustrated by being surrounded by so lovely a city, where so many interesting things are happening all the time – and only finding out about them when it was too late. The idea is to make this site an event hub for things that go beyond the traditional matsuri and big ticket events. So far, finding these events and entering them is quite time consuming, but I hope, that once the service becomes known, more people will enter their own events. At the moment, I am also working on expanding the scope of the web site. A page on vegan/vegetarian restaurants is almost done, and I am looking into “Things to do in Kyoto” as well.

At this point, this is almost the only writing that I do. I also post three times a week on my blog Going Gaijin. There I write mostly about my personal experiences in Japan, and most of my readers are probably people who know me personally. On Sundays, however, I write about topics that I consider of wider interest, like Japanese culture, events, food, books… I enjoy writing these articles, finding things out and sharing them, I guess I am a researcher at heart after all.

In my old life, I wrote a number of scientific articles, and I consider my PhD thesis my greatest achievement. Compared to that, my personal writing was always much more limited. As an introvert I did write when I needed a way to express deep emotions, like the one time when somebody jumped in front of my train… Only two handwritten pages, but they took three months to write. My records of teenage angst in the form of sporadically kept diaries have since been destroyed. My earliest writings, however, were little poems written when I was about 10 years old. My grandmother even got them published in a small local paper. I have moved on from poetry, but I still treasure those pages.

Links

• Find the event calendar here: https://whatsupinkyoto.com
• Iris’ personal blog here: https://goinggaijin.com