I'm a former "salaryman" (Osaka), former Apple employee (Cupertino), jazz musician, branding enthusiast, communications specialist, and design evangelist currently working in Japan as a fulltime marketing professor for a local private university. I'm also director of a Japanese design group and love living here in Japan.

Please find more information on my background at my website here.
Interests

OK, here's a list of my interests (in no particular order): Beautiful design, philosophy, branding, business communications, marketing, great presentations (and doing my part to help rid the world of boring, ineffective, ridiculously bad, amateurish PowerPoint presentations") Zen in the arts, Zen in daily life, Buddhism, Jazz, Blues, playing the drums, Japanese pop music (save SMAP and Ayumi Hamasaki, of course), Japanese traditional music, Okinawa music, fitness (particularly weight training & nutrition), hiking, cross-country skiing, searching out "Wabi-Sabi" in the Japanese countryside, reading (mostly non-fiction these days), Mahatma Gandhi, Ayn Rand, Plato, Taoism, Martin Luther King Jr., multimedia, technology, Apple Macintosh, Apple iPods, all things Apple, graphic design, web design, American college football (especially Oregon State Univ.), Hawaii, Oregon, Switzerland, Asia, Japanese labor management, Japanese popular culture, WWII history, laughing, good TV/film animation, leadership, education, the Ocean and incredible sunsets, helping young people (and not so young people) improve themselves, interior design, Earth Wind & Fire, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, good films, digital photography, snow, sun, spicy food, Japanese food, late-night TV, early morning coffee, reading or working in a downtown cafe, meeting friends for drinks, learning something new everyday...