Give me weed, whites, and wine
— Little Feat
I. Arrival, Trust, and First Cracks (2012–2013)
Our former principal Shiozaki sensei retired at the end of the 2011–2012 school year. He left on time, at sixty, having overseen just one International School Festival (ISF), in February 2012, and then stepping away. His departure was orderly, expected, and clean.
Not long after, my colleague Tomoko Wano and I were called into the small room next to the IB office by Mr. Higashitani, who was my direct supervisor at the time. I was still DPC then, not yet formally on the administration, though much of my work already extended beyond that role.
Higashitani told us the next principal would be Charles Fox, a literature professor from Ritsumeikan University. Then, almost casually, he added that Fox would be taking the first two weeks of the April term off to travel to the Ogasawara Islands to help his son with a documentary film.
Higashitani paused. “Is this going to work with this guy?” he asked.
It was not really a question. The decision had already been made. Fox was close to the Chancellor, and with the IB programme growing, it had been decided that it was time for a foreign principal. The appointment carried symbolic weight.
Fox arrived in April 2012.
That first year, I saw him several times a week. I went to his office regularly with issues, proposals, and requests. He came less often to the IB office, but he was visible, present, and accessible. Compared to later years, he felt engaged.
We were still very much in a building phase. Questions were fundamental rather than cosmetic: whether to bring Economics online as an IB subject, how to structure growth, how to manage staffing, how to align IB operations with a larger Japanese institution that had not fully internalized what the IB actually demanded.
Fox was generally supportive. When I raised ideas, he rarely opposed them outright. But he almost always deferred decisions upward. In practice, that meant deferring to Higashitani occasionally, but increasingly to Vice Principal Nishikawa, who was locked in a long, escalating struggle with Higashitani for control of the soul of the school. That battle would define the institution for years.
Two small things I noticed early on.
The first was small but persistent. When Fox felt pressed, uncertain, or cornered, he would drop into a performative Texas drawl: “I’m just a good old boy…I don’t know…I’m new here…” Week one, maybe. Month one, even. But it went on for months. It began to feel less like humility and more like evasion.
The second was subtler. When Fox gave speeches—opening ceremonies, graduations, addresses to the IB community—he often began by explaining that he would speak in both English and Japanese, and why. “Today I will speak in both English and Japanese. There is a reason for that. The reason is that we are a bilingual school.” He would frame bilingualism as a principle rather than simply inhabiting it.
This bothered me in a way I couldn’t quite fully articulate. Later, I would understand it clearly: real bi-cultural schools don’t justify bilingualism. They operationalize it. They have bilingual admissions, bilingual HR support, bilingual communications, bilingual crisis protocols. We had none of those things. Bilingualism existed largely at the level of speech, not structure.
The first real test came with the February 2012 ISF.
Shiozaki had spearheaded the 2011 ISF, and it had been a success. Fox was enthusiastic about repeating it, but he largely stepped back and allowed me and my team to run it. The school green-lit the budget again, and I decided to push hard—to expand, improve, and professionalize the event.
We housed everyone at Ritsumeikan BKC: our students, overseas students, overseas chaperones, Tomoko, Hashizume from our office, and myself—around 150 people in total. Some seniors had smaller rooms, but most students were housed in large shared dorm rooms: one for boys, one for girls.
It was a mistake. An obvious one, in retrospect.
Alcohol made its way in. Boundaries failed. Tomoko and I were housed in another wing entirely, and we had effectively left the students unchaperoned overnight.
The next morning, seniors came to us immediately with a full report. We called Scott, the seniors’ homeroom teacher, at six in the morning. He drove to BKC right away.
We triaged. Scott and Tomoko lectured the seniors while I ran the open mic. We separated students where we had to, called the relevant parents. Tomoko warned me that if the school heard too much too fast, they might shut the entire event down. That felt impossible to me, so we managed carefully. We called Higashitani and Fox at school around nine. Higashitani came immediately. Fox did not. He came only for the opening and closing ceremonies.
The incident was handled. There was a discipline process. Several students were suspended at the very end of term. Fox signed off on the outcome.
But I was underwhelmed. The failure had been predictable, and leadership was thin where it mattered.
By the end of 2012, the IB programme moved from an effectively open budget to a fixed annual one. I was writing policy constantly, with Tomoko translating. Documents were often finalized hours before steering meetings. Higashitani scrambled to understand them and asked for revisions between noon and four every week.
It was exhausting for everyone.
In 2013, mostly to help Higashitani, I was promoted to shukan, the junior most position on the senior administration. That year, I had two dreams—one about a train line I couldn’t quite navigate, another about being pinned inside a roller coaster that led not to thrill but to scrutiny. At the time, I read them as anxiety dreams. Later, I would recognize them as early diagnostics.
II. Competence Without Authority (2014–2015)
2014
By 2014, the rhythms of my work were established.
OD was fully in place as DPC. I traveled extensively for IBEN and with Higashitani and Fox. We were deep in negotiations with KIS over a range of matters that required patience, translation, and careful calibration. Much of the work took place in airports, hotel lobbies, and conference rooms where decisions were floated, withdrawn, and reshaped.
The pace was familiar now. Demanding, but no longer novel.
That year, Fox, Tim Chanecka, and I traveled together to OACAC in Tampa. It was a routine professional trip in the way such things often are: panels, receptions, conversations that blurred together by the second evening. The work itself wasn’t remarkable. What stayed with me happened in transit.
On the flight from Tampa to Washington, D.C., a situation developed that required de-escalation. A man—angry, agitated, and self-certain—was fixated on another passenger he described as a “long-haired liberal.” The grievance was incoherent but intense. It carried the unmistakable energy of someone looking for permission to act.
I intervened.
Not dramatically. Not heroically. I spoke to him, listened long enough to drain the pressure, redirected the conversation, and kept things moving. The moment passed. The flight landed. Nothing happened.
I’ve written about that encounter elsewhere, in Good and Great Talkers, because it captures something I’ve learned over time: that institutions, like planes, often rely on informal actors to maintain order when formal authority is either absent or ill-suited to the moment.
That was 2014.
The work continued. The travel continued. The system functioned. And once again, responsibility lived in the spaces between roles, titles, and official scripts.
2015
From the outside, 2015 looked like continuity.
OD announced in July that he would be leaving, though his departure would stretch on quietly into the following year. In the meantime, the work continued much as before. I remained shukan. Meetings accumulated. Travel continued. IBEN assignments filled gaps in the calendar. We were still deep in negotiations with KIS and other external partners. Nothing felt broken.
At the same time, a new part-time role was added to support a sensitive function. The intent was reasonable. The arrangement informal. Oversight was assumed rather than specified. No one believed this was risky. There was no sense of urgency around it, no raised voices, no formal concern. It entered the system quietly and was treated as such.
That year, David Stubbs was promoted internally to DPC. At the time, it seemed like a good move. I supported it and gave my blessing. Continuity mattered, and internal promotions suggested stability. OD’s long exit thinned leadership gradually rather than dramatically, but again, nothing yet appeared out of order.
The IBEN work continued to provide a counterpoint. Most engagements went as expected. One did not.
It was a pre-authorization engagement with Eton House in China—one of those schools grafted onto an English name without a substantive institutional connection to it. From the beginning, the situation was fragile. The designated DPC, Georgina, was out of her depth. She tried, but early Skype calls revealed fundamental gaps in understanding. The Principal micro-managed aggressively while showing little grasp of IB philosophy or process. A capable Vice Principal carried most of the operational load.
On one scheduled Skype call, I arrived ten minutes late. It was my fault. By the time I logged on, they had already left. A complaint followed. I apologized.
Shortly afterward, Georgina took the unusual step of traveling to Kyoto to seek my guidance in person. We met at a restaurant. She explained that her situation was impossible. Money was tight. Every expenditure required approval from a board chair who was rarely present. I sympathized. I gave her everything I could—practical advice, institutional context, and clarity.
The process continued. I raised concerns about funding and received pushback, but the school agreed to give Georgina limited autonomy over small expenditures. Then a more serious issue surfaced: there was no class schedule. The school had an idea of offerings but no timetable. I told them plainly that this would result in a Matter to Be Addressed—the strongest possible language in a pre-authorization report.
The Principal and Georgina said producing a schedule was impossible. The Vice Principal stopped the conversation and said he could do it overnight. He did.
With a schedule in place, the authorization eventually went through. Georgina left, likely before teaching began. Later, the school complained about me to the IB. I heard about it unofficially and acknowledged that it had been a difficult assignment. The system absorbed the friction. Life moved on.
That summer, my psyche was working as hard as I was.
On August 15, 2015, I had a dream:
I am in college (probably) or at least in a position to have a dorm room. This room is shared and I have a second room which is mine alone and in another building. Whether or not I really should have the second room is not clear, and perhaps because of this I cherish the private room. I have had this kind of set up in dreams before. The private room is well apportioned and clean. I go in and out a few times, and then one time I enter the room next door by accident. My key opens the door and immediately I realize this is not my room. The room is sparse. I leave and enter my room.
There is a new bed in the room and some of my things have been moved around. There are at first two people, an African guy maybe in his early twenties and another guy. The second guy explains that the African has been assigned to this room and that he is a refugee from the genocide in Ghana. There doesn’t seem to be a lot I can say to this so I suggest some changes to the room layout that they had set up and we make the changes. I am not happy about having a roommate however realize that this feeling is selfish in the situation and resolve to make the best of it and welcome the newcomer.
However, when I turn around deeper in the room there are two more people, Americans, a guy and a girl, on the floor eating. They are beginning to generate some garbage which they are throwing on the floor. I bend down to pick up the garbage, smiling an apology that I like to keep things neat. I do not want them to be there and don’t know where they came from.
Back toward the door the African is sitting next to a man from Albania who is shooting heroin. He may be a Roma, which for some reason I know will make stopping him more difficult. Over and over, slowly and competently. This is not good and I start strategizing how to move him out of my room. He is talking and is charismatic, however I am anxious about what will happen if he keeps taking the drug and also anxious that my African roommate will become influenced by him and start using. The whole situation seems to be verging out of my control. I consider the alternative of just ditching the room.
I didn’t analyze the dream at the time. I didn’t need to. I kept working.
Nothing yet appeared out of order.
III. Peak Without Leadership (2016–Mid-2017)
2016
In 2016, the school appeared to be thriving.
The part-time counselor was fully embedded and doing the job as defined. There were no formal complaints, no escalations, no indications that anything was wrong. Looking back, there were clues—but they were faint, contextual, and easily explained away at the time. Nothing rose to the level of alarm.
For me, the year was defined by expansion elsewhere.
My IBEN work intensified significantly. By this point I was working closely with Gill Pressland, who had become the IBEN manager for Asia-Pacific and had effectively taken over my portfolio from Avi Nanda. Avi worked in a different section of the IB organization; Gill was IBEN proper. Around this time, the IB underwent a global restructuring, and IBEN—by extension Gill—emerged with considerably more influence.
Gill was a force. Decisive, demanding, and deeply competent.
Within three years of joining IBEN, I was promoted to Lead Educator for the International Baccalaureate, one of only a handful in the region. I worked frequently with Duan Yorke, and together we handled a large volume of Diploma Programme assignments. Through this work I came to know—directly or indirectly—hundreds of IB educators. My professional network widened rapidly, and my authority in those spaces was clear and functional.
The contrast with home was increasingly stark.
Back at Ritsumeikan Uji, the long-running struggle between Nishikawa and Higashitani finally resolved. Nishikawa won. Power consolidated decisively. From that point on, the school ran flat out, with virtually every decision flowing through him.
Nishikawa was a strong leader. He worked relentlessly. He also had too much to do, and some decisions became personalized by necessity rather than design. The system no longer absorbed pressure; it transmitted it downward.
By then, Fox had become largely ceremonial. Even his speeches were written elsewhere. He attended functions, delivered remarks, and fulfilled representational duties, but operational authority no longer resided with him in any meaningful way. He felt, increasingly, like an afterthought.
We held our final International School Festival in February 2016, closing out the prior academic cycle. After that, there was no budget for me to develop or run future iterations. The festival ended not with conflict, but with quiet disappearance.
Outside the school, my life continued to widen.
I was active in the global Enneagram community and attended at least one conference that year. I was also involved with the International Mental Health Professionals of Japan, and despite not being a trained counselor, I became vice-president of the organization—another example of being entrusted with responsibility in spaces where clarity and judgment mattered more than formal credentialing.
That year, my son entered Ritsumeikan Uji as a seventh grader.
This changed my vantage point. I became more attuned to the junior high school and the International Preparatory Stream. My son did well academically, but his cohort experienced social and behavioral turbulence. I stayed lightly involved, careful to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. I watched more than I intervened.
The year ended smoothly. We graduated one of our largest IB cohorts to date. The programme was booming. Outcomes were strong. On paper, the institution was succeeding.
And yet, by the end of 2016, something essential had shifted.
2017 (Before the Break)
From the outside, 2017 looked like a peak year.
The programme was doing exceptionally well. Both the high school and junior high school streams were booming. Applications outpaced available spaces. We had decisively outperformed our nearest competitor, DISK — not marginally, but structurally — in outcomes, coherence, and momentum. Internally, this was understood. I had written about it. The data supported it.
There was no sense of institutional fragility. If anything, the opposite.
By this point, Fox had receded almost entirely into the background. He continued to fulfill ceremonial duties — speeches, appearances, the visible rhythms of a principal — and he looked the part. But operationally, he was absent. He took long lunches with the other vice principal (not Nishikawa), read the paper, and watched Texas Rangers games at work. From my vantage point, he had checked out.
What struck me was not his disengagement, but its invisibility. No one else seemed to register it. The institution continued to function smoothly enough that absence did not yet register as absence.
In practice, Nishikawa ran the school outright. Every meaningful decision flowed through him. This had been the case for some time, and by 2017 I had fully adapted to it. I took issues to him directly. He decided. The system was centralized, efficient, and under constant load.
I continued to travel extensively for the IB, working closely with Gill Pressland and handling a heavy slate of IBEN assignments. It would not have been inaccurate to say that I was holding two full-time roles simultaneously: one inside the school, one across the region. Both demanded attention. Both relied on judgment rather than formal authority.
And still, nothing appeared wrong.
The counselor role functioned as designed. There were no complaints, no escalations, no formal concerns. In hindsight, there were clues — small irregularities, moments that now read differently — but at the time they did not cohere. They were explainable. They were ignorable. They did not trigger alarms.
The system was succeeding. Leadership was diffuse but intact. Results were strong.
Which is precisely why what came next was so destabilizing.
IV. Rupture, Silence, Exit (Late 2017–2018)
The break arrived as confusion first.
Late one night in October 2017, I received a panicked call that made no sense. The next days revealed something far worse than anything we had imagined. Documentation removed ambiguity. The counselor was dismissed immediately and barred from further contact.
I issued the announcement myself—an error I recognize now.
In December, I learned she was still contacting students. Fox had promised to intervene directly if that happened. He did not. Partial measures followed.
January–April 2018 (V)
By January, our options were limited.
We hired a new university counselor, Nina, who had been working at an IB school in Nagoya. She eased into the role gradually. Tomoko and I did what we could to mentor her. She managed the relational aspects of the job reasonably well, but struggled with formal written communication in both English and Japanese. As a result, I remained deeply involved in university counseling.
The work continued.
When the new school year began in April, the pressure shifted.
A group of parents complained — not about outcomes, but about process. They argued that we had failed to protect the former counselor from what they described as an unreasonable parent, and questioned what was being done about university counseling more broadly.
I told Fox that we had already held a comprehensive meeting in January. All deadlines and procedures had been reviewed. There was no scheduled group meeting for April because nothing new needed to be communicated.
Fox said the parents needed reassurance and asked that we meet them anyway.
We did.
Fox and I drafted a set of twenty talking points together. They reiterated what had already been said in January. They clarified that families were free to work with external counselors, with one explicit exception. They also stated that the former counselor had agreed, as a condition of her departure, not to meet with students.
I read the talking points word for word.
The parents recorded the meeting. The recording was sent to the compliance department of the Ritsumeikan Trust, along with a request that Tomoko and I be dismissed.
At that point, the asymmetry was complete. I was constrained by institutional responsibility and confidentiality. The former counselor was not. Her version of events circulated freely. Mine could not.
I was formally notified of the complaint by Fox.
I was upset — not by the existence of a complaint, which I understood as an occupational risk — but by what it represented. I told him plainly that we had drafted the talking points together, that I had followed them exactly, and that I had repeatedly been placed on the front line at his request while he remained absent.
I told him that it was time for him to speak up for me.
He said there was nothing he could do. That the matter was now in the hands of compliance. That we would have to wait and see what happened.
That was the moment our relationship ended.
Not because of disagreement, but because of abdication.
What remained after that was procedural. Whatever trust had existed between us did not recover.
In late July, I served as lead trainer at a major IBEN engagement in Bali. It went extremely well. Whatever insecurity I had had about the IBEN role dissolved.
In August I went to John Innes’ wedding in the United States and after that I went to the Faculty of Astrological Studies (FAS) Summer School at Exeter College in Oxford. While there I met Isobel and everything just cracked open. Everything I had been carrying surfaced at once.
I returned to Japan and submitted a resignation letter to Fox stating plainly that I could not work under leadership that did not prioritize child safety. He buried it.
I stepped down in practice. I moved my desk. I stopped attending meetings. I began writing. This blog was born.
In October, early decision chaos erupted again. Fox ordered another teacher to verify deadlines already confirmed. I lost my temper—twice. It was the lowest point of my professional life.
After early admissions, I stopped counseling. In November, I stopped teaching. In December, I traveled to the U.S. and breathed again.
In February, I accepted a position at Ritsumeikan Suzaku. It wasn’t a teaching position, and I was not happy there, a story I’ll tell later.
The Fox era, for me, was over.
Coda and Reflection
Here’s the thing. I wanted to respect Dr. Fox. I really did.
He was my senpai—the one who came before. Like me, he arrived in Japan young and built a life here. I don’t know his full context. What was possible? What was unsayable? Those questions remain.
I don’t doubt that he cared or worked hard at times. But by 2016 at the latest, he was a man out of time. His mental map no longer matched the territory, and he did not do the work to update it.
Schools are living systems. Leadership requires vigilance, reflection, and relentless self-critique. Willingness is not readiness.
My hope—my prayer—is that when my own time comes, I do better than my senpai. That I reflect. That I adjust. That I remember the map is not the territory. And if I can’t, that I step aside.
That is the standard I now hold myself to.
Dedication: For all those who came before.
