Born in Nagoya. Raised between Kyoto and Canada. Teacher, then producer, then strategist — each chapter taught me how ideas change shape when they cross a border.
Kyoto taught me juxtaposition before I had a word for it. A thousand-year-old shrine sits next to a vending machine, and the city doesn’t blink. Context isn’t background — it’s the whole story.
I spent my teens learning the clean and jerk. Provincial champion. National competitor. Weightlifting teaches you one thing: the weight doesn’t care about your excuses. Show up or don’t.
The JET Programme put me in a small mountain village. In a community that tight, you learn fast that connection has nothing to do with fluency. It's about listening past what someone says to hear what they need.
Managing a restaurant in Kagoshima immersed me in omotenashi — hospitality that anticipates a need before it's spoken. Long nights taught me grit. The philosophy taught me grace.
London was the shift — from experiencing moments to creating them. A Master's in International Event Management. A dissertation on esports that won recognition. Agency work with emc3 that tested everything I'd learned. The gap between theory and craft started closing here.
Back in Canada. Entrepreneurship. Then the pandemic rewrote everything. But constraint taught me more about strategy than any textbook — when you can't outspend the problem, you have to outthink it.
At Boombox, the chapters converged. LCS, X Games, Call of Duty League — each franchise demanded a different thing, but the core skill was the same: understanding how to protect global IP while adapting it across markets and formats.
My role sat between brands and audiences, vision and execution. Production, it turned out, was storytelling — just with higher stakes and tighter deadlines.
Back in Tokyo. Strategy, transcreation, production — same pursuit, different name depending on who's asking. The Tokonoma Process is the framework. The work is the proof.
Where you say something changes what it means. Strategy starts there.
My career has been built inside some of the most protected IP in entertainment — Riot Games, Red Bull, PlayStation, Age of Empires. Every major franchise has a brand bible: rules built to protect decades of audience trust. The brands that break them don't fail because they were creative. They fail because they were careless.
The skill isn't compliance — it's navigation. Knowing which rules are load-bearing (break them and the brand breaks) and which rules are flexible (the room around the tokonoma that can be rebuilt for a different audience).
Respect · Freedom · Curiosity Accountability · Integrity · Kindness · Empathy · Creativity
Even if your campaign sounds right in English that might not be enough. Make sure you don't have a strategy problem. Let's talk.
Start a conversation →