Why Shinya Kogami?

This is my first post, and I’m still figuring out what this newsletter will become. But I can at least explain the name.

Shinya Kogami is a character from Psycho-Pass — an anime about a dystopian society where a system called Sibyl measures your psychological state and decides your worth. Kogami is someone who sees through the system clearly, even when clarity costs him everything. He’s been a favourite of mine for a long time.

But the name goes beyond the anime. During my PhD, when I was writing Python code and building modules for my research, I used ShinyaKogami as my username. The code I wrote, the tools I built — all of it lived under that name. It was never in any official documentation. Nobody told me to use it. It just felt like mine in a way that my institutional ID never did.

That’s also why the newsletter is called Undocumented Research Notes.

There’s a version of a researcher’s life that makes it into papers, reports, and CVs. Clean, formatted, citable. Methods sections that read like everything went according to plan. Results that look clean and inevitable, with no trace of the failed experiments, the wrong hypotheses, and the months spent going nowhere.

Then there’s everything else — the confusion, the observations, the struggle, the self-doubt, the arguments nobody wants to have out loud.

This is where I write that version. Because a long journey breaks you and rebuilds you to be more humble, more precise, and most importantly, more tolerant.