Short Opening

In my post last year, I genuinely thought: since 2024 was already that dramatic, can 2025 really get worse?

Damn. It really can.

Okay — maybe not worse overall, because I started and ended the year pretty well. But during the middle? It felt like nothing worked. The world kept sliding conservative, the economy felt stuck, leadership everywhere got shaky, and the job market was basically frozen (at least from where I was standing). If the ending hadn’t turned around, I would’ve stamped 2025 as “disappointing.” Luckily, it didn’t go that way.

Well, thinking about this, maybe this year I transferred my luck and karma to the teams I support:

So yeah, maybe I don’t get to complain too much.

Come On You Spurs & Let’s Go Pacers!

Going through my personal notion

Below are some things I did this year—again, I’m grateful for everyone who helped me: colleagues, friends, collaborators. Without you guys, none of this happens.

Publish 3 papers. As an academic, I’m obligated to do the work. I still managed to publish 3 first-author papers [1][2][3], plus a few other publications listed on my Google Scholar. Compared to last year, I was less productive—too many things happened in between. I think my writing and idea-building were okay, but I definitely need to be more active.

Finish more marathons. Earlier this year, I finished hopefully the marathon of my life - Tokyo Marathon 2025 . Nothing “special” about the race itself, but despite all odds, I hit the pace I wanted. A lot of interesting stuff happened along the way though—and I still haven’t had the time to properly recap it. Maybe next year I’ll write a separate post. I also have finished a half marathon later this year casually, and the organization/activities kinda disappointed me a bit LOL.

Traveling. I think this is the first year I started traveling seriously with friends—and actually enjoying the whole process. I went to four places, all within Japan:

  • Osaka , due to IEEE IJCB 2025 , with the lab I’m working in
  • Atami & Ito , with friends
  • Fuji-San , solo
  • U.S. Fleet Activities Yokosuka , with friends Japan is honestly one of the best places for traveling, if not the best. Not just because of service, but because it’s so convenient: the country isn’t huge, yet it’s packed with nature and variety, and everything is reachable.

And yeah, even though I’m not a “set goals” kind of guy, when I think about next year, there are things I believe are going to happen. Not wishes anymore. I’m done with wishes and “goals.”

N2. Last year, when I said I needed to improve my Japanese speaking, I meant it. But after a year… it didn’t really happen. No excuses. I spent more time healing from work-related mental damage, and I became even more hesitant about whether I want to stay in Japan at all. Switching the target from “master Japanese” to “get N2” is way more realistic. We’ll see.

Re-build the collaborations with external groups and friends. I kind of dropped this part of my life this year — for reasons I can’t fully explain yet. But next year, I think I’ll have the chance to reactivate it and push forward again. If you have any opportunities to collaborate on research or development projects, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Some mysterious life shift. I do not have too many words to say about this right now. We’ll talk about this later. For my homies and friends who already learned about this from me, I beg your silence.

Thoughts that are not covered

Depression

I never expected to be someone who experiences depression. But I guess it’s one of those things every human might run into—and I’m not special. Weirdly, I’m glad I went through it earlier rather than later, because now I’ve learned how to deal with similar stuff in the future.

First, I don’t want to blame anyone. Not my boss, not a specific colleague, not a “toxic friend.” People have their own problems and their own ways of expressing things. After almost 10 years in Europe, I should be able to adapt to different personalities and communication styles. But what I do know is: the depression and anxiety made me lose sleep, and even made my body feel weak. That’s when I realized I had to take action.

Here are a few things I did to climb out of it—hope this helps someone else too:

  • Delete social media apps. Immediately. Even if you have “business” stuff on them—health comes first. You can’t work without a functioning brain and body.

  • Go outside. Travel if you can. Not just “leave the house,” but actually separate yourself from the workplace and the usual environment. Take a weekend, or even a couple days off, and go somewhere else.

  • Disconnect from “friends” who spread toxic energy. Not saying they’re evil. Some people just talk like that. But if it triggers your depression/anxiety, then you’re not compatible. Cut the connection cleanly, but peacefully. And don’t worry about what they think—if you’re dead, you don’t even get the right to worry.

  • Let people know what’s going on. I openly posted about cutting off some connections. It was partly accidental, but I got insanely lucky: so many good friends encouraged me to speak up and change things. Even colleagues supported me after that. I really, really appreciate it. After I spoke out, my emotions became a lot more stable and controllable.

I really wanna shout out to all my friends, especially couple of them (won’t mention their names here), who not only encouraged me to make a change and move on, but also brought/led me to a lot of interesting activities and events (e.g. my 1st and 2nd concert!!! I owe you AKe my boy). It also encouraged me to embrace more events hosting around and not considering work from time to time.

Japan

After living in Japan for more than 2.5 years, I think I’ve earned the right to say a few things. If you’re someone thinking of coming to Japan as a fresh grad or newcomer, here are some trivial facts and suggestions.

The conservative shift is real. Japan is getting more conservative and less friendly to diversity. Politically, the right wing is gaining momentum, and the policies are becoming more unfriendly to newcomers. I’m not even ranting—this is just reality. Politicians are stuck in a weird dilemma: on one hand they need more workers to address low birth rate; on the other hand, right-wing supporters believe newcomers are “corrupting” Japanese culture. So the vibe becomes: they want labor, not humans. Of course, politicians are actually quite away from regular people’s lives in Japan, but the effect can be real, and I’ve actually experienced some incidents related during my office shift. I’m not gonna go into this too much.

Rise of living cost. Tokyo keeps getting more expensive. And if you’re a foreigner earning yen, you definitely feel the currency weakening plus the cost increasing. I’m from China, so the contrast hits extra hard (also I’m kinda broke lol). Supermarkets, convenience stores, vending machines… you can tell prices have been rising—slowly, but consistently.

But, it is still a very good choice! Despite all that, Japan is still my second favorite country for long-term living so far (Singapore was #1 in 2022—no idea how it’s going now with the new Prime Minister). Japan is organized, peaceful, and sometimes too comfortable—it can make you lazy in the best and worst way. And honestly, I can’t complain about the quality of life: decent housing, clean air, four seasons, and friendly people from all over the world. I’ve made a lot of friends here—without even needing alcohol. Whoever you are, whatever you’re into, whatever you believe—if you’re here, you’ll find people who accept you.

So if you can separate work and life really, really well—and you’re careful about picking opportunities — I don’t see why not! I personally don’t think I have a future here, but I still recommend people come and enjoy the colorful life.

Then you my ask: WTF? Why you say you are not gonna have a future here? Are you trolling us?

My really needs

Here’s the answer.

After the depression, I started thinking very seriously about what I actually want to do long-term. And I finally pulled the real thought back out of my heart:

I want a career I can dedicate my whole life to.

But in Japan, that’s hard — for multiple reasons.

The most obvious one is how everything feels milestone-based and tightly allocated. As researchers, we can start to feel like gears instead of humans. I also realized I was losing my ability to generate ideas proactively and energetically. I know that sounds brutal toward my boss, and I genuinely believe he tries hard to block us from it, which I am really thanksful. But I think this is partly the nature of the work culture here. And even if I’m not some genius who “deserves” infinite freedom, I still can’t accept this as someone who likes to work in a more messy, chaotic, grassroots way. So… life goes on.

There are other reasons I’m keeping to myself for now. I’ll talk about them one day whenever I found it’s appropriate to do so, especially when I’m at better positions.

So I’ve decided to make changes. If nothing goes wrong, I’ll write about it in a separate post early next year. I know almost nobody reads my posts, but for the few who do: stay tuned.

That’s basically my 2025. Signing off, and wishing everyone a prosperous 2026.

UNDERDOG

2025-12-27

Zhengzhou, 4C, Cloudy

References

[1] Learning Relationship between Speaker Embeddings and Descriptions of Speaker Traits , Xuechen Liu, Junichi Yamagishi, Xin Wang, and Erica Cooper, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2025.

[2] LENS-DF: Deepfake Detection and Temporal Localization for Long-Form Noisy Speech , Xuechen Liu, Wanying Ge, Xin Wang, and Junichi Yamagishi, IEEE IJCB 2025 (oral), Osaka, Japan.

[3] Zero-Day Audio DeepFake Detection via Retrieval Augmentation and Profile Matching, Xuechen Liu, Xin Wang, and Junichi Yamagishi, 2025.