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On the Long Cut: The COVID Years (2019–2022)

Note: This essay forms part of a longer series recounting my professional life in and around the International Baccalaureate program at Ritsumeikan Uji. It follows earlier pieces concerning the Dr. Fox years and the gradual evolution of the IB program there, and covers the period roughly from late 2018 through the early months of 2022.

The years described here coincided with the global COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted institutions and routines in ways both large and small. The narrative therefore moves between several overlapping threads: my temporary assignment at the Suzaku campus, a prolonged period of leave and personal drift, the strange half-life of Kyoto’s bar culture during the pandemic years, and finally my gradual return to teaching and the IB program at Uji.

As with other pieces in this series, some names and identifying details have been adjusted or omitted where appropriate. The goal of the essay is not to settle institutional scores but to record the texture of a particular stretch of life—its confusions, absurdities, and small recoveries of purpose.

Readers encountering this piece independently may wish to consult earlier essays in the series, including those on the Dr. Fox period and related institutional episodes, for additional context.

Epigraph

“If you wanna take the long cut / we’ll get there eventually.”
— Uncle Tupelo

I. Return

On December 20, 2018, I landed at Kansai International Airport after a twenty-two-day music trip along the American East Coast. I had seen bands in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, spent too much money, and generally had the time of my life. That journey has been written about elsewhere, so I won’t linger on it here. What matters for this story is simply that I came back to Japan exhilarated and somewhat unmoored.

The first thing I did upon landing was send an email to Dr. Fox. I told him that although I still carried some anger about how things had ended at Ritsumeikan Uji, I appreciated his help securing a temporary role for me at Suzaku beginning in March. Both statements were true. What I did not yet know was how miserable that position would become.

I had two months before the job began. They were among the freest weeks I had experienced in years.

I wrote constantly. I worked on the early sections of Thin Man: Singapore and drafted essays that would later become Eventification, Helmet Laws, and On Zone Defense. I was about to begin the St. George’s School series. Periscope had faded from my life, partly because the platform had run its course and partly because a particular person who had made it interesting to me was no longer there.

I spent some time with Philip, though he was busy with his own life and his relationship with his wife seemed temporarily on the mend. Mostly I wandered between Tokyo and Kyoto, writing and drinking coffee and enjoying the strange luxury of being at loose ends.

In the third week of January I attended a Drunk Poets open mic in a small bar near Shibuya. I arrived absurdly early because I didn’t know the neighborhood. While waiting in the stairwell I met a woman who introduced herself using her poetry name. We talked for nearly an hour before the reading began. She was a veteran of the open-mic circuit and showed me how the evening worked. I read first after the break; she followed me.

It was a pleasant night. I had no idea at the time that the conversation we began that evening would extend, mostly by phone, for more than two years.

II. Suzaku

My assignment at Suzaku began on March 1, 2019.

There were no students.

Technically the building housed graduate programs, but they lived on lower floors and we might as well have been ships passing in the night. My office was on the fifth floor, a large open room filled with perhaps forty people: a mix of temporary teachers like myself and permanent administrative staff.

It was, in a word, dreary.

I commuted each morning to Karasuma Oike, walked down to the Suzaku campus, sat at my desk, and tried to look busy until five o’clock. Sometimes a consultant whose job seemed to consist mainly of visiting other campuses would take me on excursions to places like OIC or the original Ritsumeikan High School. These trips were well-intentioned but clarified nothing. No one quite knew why I was there, least of all me.

Within days I began to feel something I had never really experienced before: the creeping onset of depression. The problem was not that the work was difficult. It was that there was no work at all.

By April I had started leaving the office early. By May I was appearing only sporadically. The remarkable thing was that no one seemed to notice.

III. Drift

If I was not at Suzaku, where was I?

Mostly at home.

During the day I played chess online, usually on Chess.com or Lichess. I climbed to around 1250 on the former and somewhat higher on the latter, though the Lichess ratings were clearly inflated. My openings were solid, my middlegame acceptable, and my endgame play atrocious. I squandered many promising positions by failing to convert them.

I watched instructional streams from Levy Rozman and occasionally from Hikaru Nakamura, though Levy was the better teacher. His explanations were clear and energetic, and I learned a great deal.

When I wasn’t playing chess I listened to podcasts. The rotation included nearly every program produced by Bill Simmons and the broader Ringer network, followed by an increasingly large catalog of true-crime shows. What fascinated me most were disappearance cases—stories in which someone simply vanished and left investigators grasping for explanations.

Meanwhile the phone conversations that had begun in the stairwell in Shibuya continued. They were long conversations—sometimes five hours a day—covering everything from literature to relationships to increasingly elaborate stories about future plans and imagined fortunes. At first the exchanges were exciting; over time they became exhausting, though we kept talking.

In the evenings I left the apartment and walked to the bars near Karasuma Oike. Takumiya and its sister bar Takanoya became regular stops. Eventually I found myself most often at a tiny machiya bar called Before 9.

IV. Before 9

Before 9 was small even by Kyoto standards. Downstairs there was room for perhaps five or six people around the bar; upstairs another half dozen could sit beneath the original wooden beams of the converted house. Jazz or ambient music played quietly while large black-and-white films—Seven Samurai, Casablanca—were projected silently on the wall.

The bartender most nights was Miyuki.

Philip and I nicknamed her “the Ice Queen,” though not to her face. She could be sharp-tongued and intimidating, yet occasionally revealed flashes of warmth that suggested a softer personality underneath. Regulars were greeted with a curt “What do you want?” delivered with theatrical indifference.

She wore black almost exclusively and carried herself with the confidence of someone who knew exactly how striking she looked. I developed a mild crush on her, though it was clear from the beginning that the feeling would remain entirely one-sided.

During the pandemic the bar officially closed at eight in the evening, though the rule was treated with some creativity. One night two inspectors arrived precisely at closing time. Miyuki announced “last call” in an exaggerated voice, served them a beer they never drank, watched them leave, pulled down the shutters, and then reopened the bar for the regulars.

That was the culture for several years.

V. Leave

In October 2019 the situation at Suzaku was finally addressed. A supervisor called me in and gently suggested that it might be best if I took leave. I agreed immediately. Beginning in November I was officially on leave—a status that would last until October 2021.

Oddly, I felt relieved.

VI. The World Changes

Early in 2020 I read a brief news report about a virus outbreak in Wuhan. At first the story seemed distant and provisional. Within weeks it dominated every headline in the world.

The pandemic years blurred together. Bars closed early, then reopened, then closed again. Conversations moved onto phones and screens. Life contracted into smaller and smaller spaces.

Yet the routines I had developed continued: chess, podcasts, the evening walk to Oike, the occasional drink with Philip or Mackenzie.

VII. Return

In October 2021 an unexpected opportunity appeared.

Andy Meichtry needed to take extended leave after a family emergency. His timetable included several sections of a class called Academic Research in the International Program. VP Nishikawa, who had always been supportive of my return to IB, suggested that I fill the gap.

So I put the uniform back on and returned to Ritsumeikan Uji.

The first challenge was that no one could tell me what the Academic Research course actually entailed. The teacher who normally handled it was on extended medical leave, and the only materials available were a handful of PowerPoint slides sent without explanation.

In the spirit of William Ian Miller, I decided to fake it until I made it.

The students—seniors working on research projects related to the Sustainable Development Goals—were relaxed, good-natured, and only months from graduation. We muddled through together, and somehow two months passed quickly.

VIII. Administrative Comedy

During this period a new principal, Dr. Joseph Hicks, made an impression.

The IB morning briefing was designed to last three minutes and cover the day’s essential information. Dr. Hicks instead preferred to open with extended digressions on topics such as the reproductive habits of moles. After a week I suggested that perhaps the zoology lectures could be postponed. To his credit, he stopped immediately.

Later, during my annual teacher meeting—normally a brief conversation about contracts and responsibilities—he spent most of the time explaining the virtues of traditional Polish music.

I left better informed about Eastern European folk traditions but none the wiser about my job.

IX. Reinstatement

Administrative reshuffling followed later that year, and by January 2022 I was formally reinstated in the International Baccalaureate program.

My roles included IB1 head, CAS coordinator, and student council advisor, along with a single section of Higher Level Business Management.

After the drifting years, stepping back into a classroom felt like a jolt of electricity.

The students were lively and engaged, but one in particular stood out: Karin Sayama, whose enthusiasm for the course reminded me why I had chosen this profession in the first place. Watching her and her classmates rediscover the subject gave me a renewed sense of purpose.

For the first time in years I felt genuinely happy to be at work.

The long cut had taken its time.

But eventually it brought me home.

Dedication

For Karin.
With deep appreciation.

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Scenes from St. George’s Part III: Mr. Dreyer, French Teacher Extraordinaire (with a cameo from Richard Marx)

When I was in middle school I took French from one Monsieur Dreyer. I had already been studying (the verb is used loosely) French for a couple of years, and had some of the basics. In Mr. Dreyer’s class I learned a little more, and could actually kind of hack it in French there for a bit. But any actual language learning that took place in Mr. Dreyer’s class was seriously secondary to the excellent action that took place around his class.

I wasn’t first introduced to Mr. Dreyer in middle school, however. In fact, I first met him when I was in elementary school around the time he began teaching at the school where my father taught, and I attended, in the early 1980s. I remember going to the apartment he shared with his wife, who is Japanese, when they had an exchange student called Atsushi from Japan staying with them. Atsushi was my age, and he showed us how to make onigiri (rice balls). Making rice balls is not all that tough, just rice, water, and salt. Still, I thought onigiri were pretty exotic and Atsushi pretty cool. Some time later Mr. Dreyer and his wife must have come up a bit short of ready cash, because they lived in a tent in my family’s front yard for a while. This seems a little strange looking back, but it wasn’t then. I have no idea what the bathroom or shower situation looked like, but something must have happened.

(My brother Mike also lived out in a tent in the front yard during the summer for a number of years. Maybe it was the same tent. Mike would run an extension cord out to the tent and play his boombox. This was a few years after the Dreyer clan was tenting it, and Mike was deep into the singer Richard Marx. I thought Richard Marx was alright, but he didn’t seem to have a lot of songs. This mattered not at all to Mike who played the same Richard Marx tunes over and over again.

Today Richard Marx is, strangely enough, bigger than ever. But not as a musician. He runs a popular Twitter account where he is a big liberal and also pretty funny. Marx is like Rex Chapman but less problematic. Rex Chapman is super-problematic. I’m not sure exactly how, I just know he is.)

Mr. Dreyer also played a little chess with my father, although my impression is that both of them were pretty bad. Certainly they were not pulling out a lot of “hard-to-find” moves. At that time, I knew Mr. Dreyer was a French teacher, but didn’t know if he was in fact French. Today I believe it to be the case that he is not French, is in fact from California, and just somehow became proficient in the language. Good for him.

Even before I took his class, I was aware that Mr. Dreyer was, let’s say, a different sort of fellow. He liked to tell a story about his brother who lived on a massive contour map of the San Francisco Bay area. The map was located in an enclosed structure that hung under a bridge in Oakland or something. And his brother just chilled there full time, so the story went. So Mr. Dreyer, apparently, was the normal one in his family.

(I remember Mr. Dreyer talking to me about John Lennon one day as well. This was maybe when I was taking his class, but I think it might have been before that. “John Lennon’s assassination was really sad,” he said, “he was just starting to put his life back together.” I had heard of John Lennon but at that time knew nothing of the circumstances of his death. And I certainly didn’t know about his ups and downs in the 1970s. Mr. Dreyer must have been a Lennon fan though, and wanted to tell me about it.)

In any case, when I got to middle school I was assigned Mr. Dreyer, as mentioned. Mr. Dreyer wore a mustache that looked pretty Frenchy to me—maybe that’s why I kind of thought he was a French native. There were also a number of the Tintin books in French on a shelf in the back of the room. I had read most of the Tintin books in English by then, so it was fun to browse the French versions and take in some of the action from a new lens.

In Mr. Dreyer’s class everyone got a “French name,” and I was called “Philippe.” I don’t really care for all these fake names in language class, although I recognize that some people do adopt them as a kind of alter ego. I mean, if a Japanese gal called “Sari” wants to go by “Sally” in English class that’s great. Makes sense. But my actual name sounds nothing like Philippe, so it just seemed kind of random. In any case, little Phillippe was not a bad French student, but he was a restless one. Mr. Dreyer’s classroom opened from the back door onto a kind of grassy area, and for reasons passing understating Philippe would leave class in the middle of the lesson and then try to crawl back in through the back door and up through the room, hoping to escape Mr. Dreyer’s attention. Mr. Dreyer did notice, of course, but he was pretty cool about it.

“What you doing there Philippe? Sneaking back into the room again? Welcome to French class si vous plait.” Something like that. I wasn’t trying to aggravate Mr. Dreyer or anything because I really liked him as a teacher, I was just doing what 12 year old boys do. However, Mr. Dreyer did not view every student as leniently as myself. One of my classmates was a guy we’ll call “E.P.” E.P. was a trouble-maker, and was known to pull the fire alarm in the middle school there on a regular basis. His parents were called, repeatedly, but he didn’t care. He loved pulling that fire alarm. E.P. would also prank call mothers of other students for whom he somehow had phone numbers from the school phone and talk dirty to them in a fake voice. So, yeah.

One week, E.P. and some other students had started throwing wadded up pieces of paper toward a metal garbage can located at the front right corner of Mr. Dreyer’s classroom. Mr. Dreyer let this roll for a few days, however one day before lunch he decided to crack down. “Mr. E.P.,” he said, “I’ll make you a deal.” “You can have one more throw of a paper at that trash can. If you make it, you can go to lunch. If you miss, you have lunch detention.”

Now this struck me as a pretty fair deal, because E.P. didn’t have to accept the challenge. He could have just passed and gone about his day. That, of course, is not what happened. Instead, E.P. wadded up yet another piece of paper and lobbed it at the trash can. He missed. This was the last straw for Mr. Dreyer who, instead of keeping him in detention as promised, took matters a step further. He grabbed the trash can (which was about three and a half feet high) and carried it over to where E.P. was sitting.

“You like garbage!” he shouted. “I’ll show you garbage.” And sure enough Mr. Dreyer, onigiri expert, former tent dweller, and French teacher extraordinaire, emptied the whole thing right on top of E.P.’s dome. Now you might think this was some bad action, and from today’s perspective sure, it probably was. But for us middle schoolers it was hysterical.

“Did you hear what Mr. Dreyer did?” we whispered for the rest of the week. “He dumped a full garbage can on E.P.’s head.” This was the biggest thing to happen all month, and we milked it, obviously. Again, if this happened today, Mr. Dreyer might have faced some kind of sanction, but the 1980’s were not like that. E.P. had been dumped on, and life moved on.

Mr. Dreyer eventually left that school and moved to Kyoto where he taught for a while at Kyoto International School before ultimately moving back to California where his brother lived on a map. Years later I reconnected with Mr. Dreyer on Facebook, where he regularly posts groaningly bad, yet still somehow funny, visual puns. “Cyrano wins by a nose” with a drawing of Cyrano crossing the finish line in a foot race, that sort of thing. Anyway, I wanted to get his perspective on the whole the garbage can situation so I sent him a message. What did he recall of the incident?

He didn’t remember it at first, but then he said “oh yes, that was with a student called “J.”

“No,” I replied, “it was with E.P.”

“No, no, no,” he replied, it was “J. JFK.”

Now I knew that Mr. Dreyer is prone to making some strange jokes, and at first I thought he was making some kind of oblique assassination reference. Was he suggesting that there must have been a second shooter?

“This was not JFK related,” I said. “It was some E.P. action. I‘m sure of it.”

Mr. Dreyer was not sold though, and it occurred to me that there may have been more than one dumping. This may, in fact, have been Dreyer’s go-to-move. After all, his treatment of E.P. was, in truth, pretty unfair—the deal was advertised as sink the shot or detention. Dumping was never mentioned. Was Dreyer moving about the globe and dumping full garbage cans on students left and right? It was a possibility. Maybe I was smart to stay low to the ground after all.

These days, Mr. Dreyer is living in California where he enjoys the warm climate. And he reads this blog. Hey there Mr. Dreyer baby, you’re a cool guy but that garbage can move could maybe use a little reflection. E.P. was a troublemaker, sure, but dumping just wasn’t part of the deal.

to be continued…