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On My Early Years in the IB, 2008–2010

Note: This piece belongs to a loose series of reflections on my years working with the International Baccalaureate at Ritsumeikan Uji.

Over the years I have written about various moments and characters from that period — the improbable dinner conversations, the bureaucratic skirmishes, the strange coalition of personalities that somehow managed to build something durable inside a large Japanese school system. Pieces such as On the Eventification of Pre-Identified Incidents, Dr. Fox, and On Good and Great Talkers circle around that same institutional landscape from different angles.

This essay goes further back than those. It describes the early years when the program existed mostly on paper, when the staff could still fit around a single table, and when the whole project balanced uneasily between optimism and administrative chaos.

Looking back now, what strikes me most is not the difficulty of the work itself but the sheer improbability of the outcome. Programs like this often fail quietly long before authorization. The fact that ours did not is largely due to a small group of people who were willing, for a time, to push far harder than their job descriptions required.

This piece is my attempt to record that moment before memory smooths it into something simpler than it really was.

Epigraph

“It’s like a visit to the moon

or to that other star

I guess you’ll go for nothing

if you really want to go that far.”

— Leonard Cohen, Death of a Ladies’ Man

I. The Call-Up

In February 2008 I was called down to the principal’s office at Ritsumeikan Uji.

At that point I had been at the school for several years already. I had started part-time in 2002–03, moved to full-time shortly after, and by 2007 had landed on what I later called the “man under the bridge contract.” The bridge in question was a middleman arrangement run through a broker named Masaki Yasumoto, a classic education-world intermediary. These figures flourish in private school systems: part fixer, part recruiter, part relationship broker.

Masaki was a funny guy. We were friendly in those days. He invited me to his Christmas parties—cheap hotel buffet affairs—and occasionally took me out for yakiniku. I later fell out with him, but that belongs to another story. At the time we were on good terms.

Through Masaki’s bridge contract the school kept me on staff while avoiding a full tenured appointment.

So in February 2008 I was teaching SEL under Mary Walters and a handful of social studies classes. Business Management was still in my future.

That morning Principal Kitamura and Vice-Principal Terada called me in.

We sat on the little sofa chairs in the office.

They pitched me the role of IB Diploma Programme Coordinator.

At the time I knew almost nothing about the International Baccalaureate.

My entire knowledge base consisted of one fact: a school called Katoh Gakuen near Numazu had introduced IB in 1999. That information had come secondhand from Mr. Ogawa, our Head of High School.

That was it.

No workshops.

No training.

No background.

Just the idea.

When they asked if I would take the job, I said yes—on one condition.

I needed a sennin appointment when the bridge contract ended.

Kitamura said we could revisit the matter in a year.

Good enough.

I went home and discussed it with my wife.

The next day I accepted.

I was 34 years old and this felt like my big break.

I was determined to make the most of it.

II. The Principals

When I first arrived at Ritsumeikan Uji in 2002 the principal was Kawasaki.

I barely knew him.

He made speeches at opening ceremonies and graduations but I never interacted with him personally. The gossip around the school was that he was a major power broker in the wider Ritsumeikan system. The other rumor—less flattering—was that he hired office staff based largely on the attractiveness of their legs. Whether true or not, the administrative office at the time did indeed contain several strikingly good-looking employees.

In 2008 Kawasaki left the school and moved to a senior role at Ritsumeikan Suzaku.

Later he attempted to become Chancellor of the entire university system. That campaign became a minor drama inside the organization. My immediate boss at the time, Dr. Fox, supported him, as did another senior administrator, Higashitani.

At one point Kawasaki’s campaign team came to Uji to gather support.

In the meeting room one of the Suzaku representatives looked at me—sitting there in a suit—and said:

“Dr. Fox, we are so happy to have your support.”

Fox was about 65 years old at the time.

I was 39.

But apparently one foreigner looked like another.

It was harmless and genuinely funny.

Kawasaki ultimately lost the election by a handful of votes and eventually left the Ritsumeikan system.

III. The Placeholder

Kawasaki’s successor at Uji was Kitamura.

This appointment shocked everyone.

Kitamura had been Head of the Junior High School and had relatively little senior administrative experience. Overnight he jumped several levels and became principal.

Only later did I learn the reason.

Kitamura was essentially a placeholder.

The real plan was for Shiozaki, a senior administrator who had been on extended medical leave, to return once his health recovered. Shiozaki was nearing retirement age and the system wanted him back in charge before he finished his career.

Kitamura’s job was simply to keep the seat warm.

And to his credit, he did exactly that.

He also gave me my big break.

Years later I saw him again at the Kyoto girls’ Ekiden race on Christmas Eve. He was wearing a worn sweater and looked slightly down on his luck.

I didn’t exactly admire him as a leader.

But I always felt compassion for him.

He took the bullet for the squad.

IV. Hashizume

Another key figure in the early IB story was Hashizume.

Hashizume occupied a strange position.

Officially he was an office administrator.

In practice he was the number two power in the building. All major financial decisions flowed through him.

Every yen connected to the IB project passed through his hands.

His real passion, however, was American football.

He coached the boys’ football team and took the job extremely seriously. Years later he left Uji entirely after being recruited by a major university program in Tokyo.

Dr. Higashitani, who despised him, called the hiring university “idiots and imbeciles” when he heard the news.

Hashizume was also a prodigious drinker.

We went out drinking together exactly once.

It started at ING, the little rock bar in Kiyamachi.

Then we moved to several other bars.

Then it was 3 AM.

Then Hashizume started calling friends who owned additional bars and asking them to stay open.

They agreed.

By the time I finally staggered home it was about 4:30 in the morning.

The next day I was violently hungover.

Pocari Sweat. Miso soup. Saltines.

Nothing stayed down.

By noon I was in the hospital on an IV.

Hashizume, meanwhile, seemed perfectly fine.

V. Terada

The most important administrator in the entire early IB story was Vice-Principal Terada.

Terada had spent fifteen years in the school as a homeroom teacher and grade leader before moving into administration.

When the IB project began he became my direct ally.

Every Tuesday afternoon the school held the Steering Committee meeting.

This was the arena where every IB proposal had to be approved.

My memos would go to Terada first.

He rewrote them in polished Ritsumeikan bureaucratic Japanese and presented them to the committee.

I usually stayed silent.

Terada handled the negotiations.

One day I noticed something interesting.

Whenever someone opposed one of our proposals—especially Ms. Ono, my great nemesis—Terada would cover his mouth with his hand and say something like:

“That is a very good point. We will have to think about that.”

At first I believed him.

Then one day after a meeting I confronted him in a small side room.

He laughed.

“No,” he said.

“We are not thinking about it at all.”

He was simply letting the opposition save face.

That was when I realized I could trust him completely.

VI. Pre-Authorization

Our pre-authorization visit came in May 2009.

The visiting team included Steve Keegan from the IB regional office and Peter MacKenzie, principal of Hiroshima International School.

At that point we barely had a staff.

It was essentially just me and Tim Chanecka, who was helping temporarily until we could hire more teachers.

I had written almost all of the program policies myself—language policy, assessment policy, academic honesty—working largely alone.

The visit went reasonably well.

At one point Keegan left the room and accidentally left his notebook open.

I glanced down.

The only thing written on the page was:

“Stress in the school.”

Fair enough.

We passed pre-authorization.

VII. The Staff

By the time the authorization visit in May 2010 arrived we had assembled an actual team.

The core group looked like this:

  • Me — DPC, CAS, TOK, Business Management, and History
  • Scott — English A and future homeroom teacher
  • Mike — Mathematics, assessment, and scheduling
  • Tomoko Wano — Japanese A and translation powerhouse
  • Nick Sutton — Physics (part-time)
  • Oliver Manlike — Chemistry curriculum design
  • Ayako Kurokawa — Visual Arts

Wano in particular was indispensable. She attended every senior meeting, translated every document, and essentially kept the program alive during its early phase.

Without her we would not have survived.

VIII. The Dinners

During the authorization visit we hosted the visiting team for two dinners.

The first night I chose a small izakaya near Kyoto Station.

Mary Walters had warned me that it was “kind of a greasy spoon.”

But when we arrived Peter MacKenzie looked around happily and said:

“This is great. People usually take us to the fanciest restaurant in town to try and impress us.”

Score one for the hokke and the frosty mugs of beer.

The second dinner took place at Suzaku.

Five of us attended: Shiozaki, Keegan, MacKenzie, a sharply dressed Suzaku administrator with a goatee, and me.

At one point MacKenzie’s wine glass ran empty.

There was no waiter nearby.

So I stood up, walked around the table, and refilled his glass.

When I sat down the Suzaku administrator gave me a small approving nod.

Another quiet point scored.

IX. The August Scare

The visit ended.

Then we waited.

Weeks passed.

By mid-August there was still no decision.

At the time I was in Oregon, visiting my family with Sachie and Hugh.

Instead of relaxing I spent the vacation checking email obsessively.

Finally I contacted Keegan.

A few days later he replied.

There was a problem.

Several of our teachers—including me—did not possess formal teaching licenses in our home countries.

I reminded him that we had discussed this already during the visit.

The Kyoto Board of Education did not require Western-style teaching licenses. They evaluated subject knowledge based on transcripts and TESL credentials.

Keegan agreed.

But Peter MacKenzie was raising objections.

So I pushed back.

Politely—but firmly.

The IB operates in over 120 countries.

Mandatory teaching licenses are not a universal requirement.

Then I gathered examples from elite IB schools in the United States whose hiring requirements explicitly did not require teaching licenses.

After that the objection disappeared.

Two weeks later the decision arrived.

Ritsumeikan Uji was officially granted IB World School status.

The certificate—signed by IB Director General Jeffrey Beard—was hung in the principal’s office.

After months of uncertainty, we finally exhaled.

X. Exhaustion

In truth, by that point I was completely spent.

That summer I had also attended the OACAC conference at Babson College as the school’s overseas college counselor.

I had traveled, networked, presented, and worked almost nonstop.

By the time authorization finally arrived I felt less triumphant than drained.

Not depressed.

Just cooked.

The exhaustion lasted until about November 2010.

After that I rallied.

Because the next great milestone was coming.

In April 2011 we would begin our first actual IB teaching.

But that is another story.

Dedication

For the whole team that carried our little IB program through authorization.

A million thank-yous.

And especially for Vice-Principal Terada.

Note:

Posted on by Matt Thomas

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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