…no fiter.
There are times in life when you know you are in the middle of something difficult, important, and defining, even before it is finished. The past three years at OWIS Osaka have been that for me.
When I look back now, what stands out is not only the growth of the school, though that is obvious enough in numbers, buildings, programs, people, and possibility. What stands out more is the intensity of it. The compression of effort. The constant requirement to move from vision to detail, from principle to action, from hope to problem-solving, often several times in the same day. Building a school is not an abstract exercise. It is physical, emotional, strategic, relational, and deeply personal. In many ways, it asks everything of you.
And it has asked a great deal of me.
When OWIS Osaka began, it was not a polished thing. It was not a settled institution with traditions, systems, confidence, and rhythm already in place. It was raw. It was potential. It was a bet on possibility. A school beginning almost from nothing is both exhilarating and dangerous. There is freedom in it, but also exposure. Everything matters. Every hire matters. Every parent conversation matters. Every student matters. Every timetable, every corridor, every email, every missed detail, every small success. In an established school, many things are already carried by history. In a new school, history has not yet been written. You are writing it as you go, and usually while carrying boxes.
That is one of the truths I have lived with over these years. There is no clean separation between the strategic and the practical. You can be discussing long-term educational philosophy in one moment and worrying about traffic flow, staffing shortfalls, procurement, safety procedures, parent confidence, and classroom readiness in the next. You can be trying to define what kind of learner you want to help shape while also wondering whether the right tables have arrived, whether the support structures are sufficient, whether the team is holding together, whether growth is coming too fast or not fast enough. It is all one thing in the end. Culture is not built from slogans. It is built from decisions under pressure.
There were highs, of course. Real highs. The kind that stay with you.
Opening the school at all was one. Seeing students walk into a place that had previously only existed in planning documents, conversations, site visits, staffing charts, and conviction was one. Watching families choose us, especially in those early days when so much still had to be proved, meant something very deep to me. Growth meant something too, not because numbers alone matter, but because each increase in enrolment represented trust. Trust from families. Trust from staff. Trust from children walking into an unfinished story and believing it could become their school.
There were moments when I could feel the thing becoming real in a deeper sense. Not just operationally real, but emotionally and culturally real. When students began to speak with confidence about their school. When staff began to take ownership instead of simply following direction. When community events stopped feeling like staged obligations and started to feel like genuine gatherings. When the Blue Royals identity took hold. When the mascot, the field, the programs, the performances, the language of agency and purpose, and the day-to-day life of the school began to connect. Those moments mattered because they suggested that this was no longer only a project. It was becoming a place.
And then there were the lows.
It would be dishonest to speak of this period in purely triumphant terms. That would flatten the experience into something false. The truth is that building a school at speed, within constraints, through layers of bureaucracy, with the usual imperfections of people and systems, is often exhausting. There were many days when the burden felt too broad and too constant. Too many moving parts. Too many things resting on too few people. Too many decisions that had to be made before there was enough information. Too many situations where one weakness in the system became three new problems by the end of the week.
I have felt frustration. A lot of it. Frustration with delay, with misalignment, with poor judgment, with avoidable inefficiency, with structures that do not understand the lived reality on the ground. Frustration too with the fact that not everyone sees what a school is, or what it requires, or how delicate its ecology really is. A school is not a product. It is not a branch office. It is not a collection of departments. It is a human organism. It depends on trust, timing, credibility, standards, relationships, instinct, and care. Once that is misunderstood, many bad decisions become possible.
I have also felt disappointment, sometimes in others, sometimes in circumstances, and sometimes in myself. There are things I would do differently. There are conversations I would handle better. There are places where I was probably too patient and places where I was not patient enough. There were moments when I carried too much instead of redistributing responsibility more decisively. There were also moments when I was so fixed on what needed to be built that I did not always leave enough room to acknowledge what had already been achieved.
That is one of the harder lessons. When you are building, it is easy to live perpetually in deficit. To see only what is missing. To remain fixed on the next problem, the next phase, the next correction, the next risk. There is value in that vigilance, because institutions can drift or weaken if leaders become sentimental too soon. But there is also a cost. You can miss the life that is actually happening. You can fail to notice that what was once fragile is now standing. That what was once imagined is now inhabited by children with real attachments, routines, memories, and ambitions.
Over these three years, I have learned again that leadership is not glamour. It is load-bearing. It is often lonely in specific ways. Not because one is isolated from people, but because responsibility has a way of concentrating experience. Much of leadership is absorbing complexity without passing all of its force on to others. It is holding the line when clarity is incomplete. It is making judgments under pressure and then living with the consequences. It is protecting the possibility of a place while sometimes being misunderstood by those who only encounter one part of the reality. It is trying to stay principled without becoming rigid, and trying to stay humane without becoming vague.
I have had to rely on a number of tools, though “tools” may not be the right word for all of them. Some were strengths I have developed over many years. Some were simply habits of survival.
Vision has mattered. Without it, I do not think any of this could have been sustained. You need a reason that is larger than administration. Larger than meetings and targets and reports. You need to believe that education still matters in a deep sense. That a school can be more than a service provider. That children deserve places where they are known, challenged, developed, and invited into real growth. That character matters. That language matters. That standards matter. That purpose matters. I have carried those beliefs strongly. They have steadied me.
Experience has mattered too. I have not come to this work fresh from theory. I have lived in schools and around education for a long time. I have seen enough to recognize certain patterns early. I know that morale matters. That parent trust matters. That the quality of the staff room matters. That small concessions in standards eventually become cultural habits if they are not addressed. That students read adults more quickly than adults realize. That schools rise or fall not only by their ideals, but by the alignment between their ideals and their daily conduct.
Stubbornness has also mattered, for better and worse. There are things I do not give up on easily. That has helped me. It has also cost me. Sometimes persistence is a virtue. Sometimes it becomes overextension. I know I have crossed that line at times. I have pushed hard. I have expected a lot. I have held the bar high. I do not regret that in principle, because schools require seriousness if they are to become places of substance. But I also know that intensity needs calibration. Not everyone can carry weight in the same way. Not everyone reads urgency the same way. That has been part of the learning too.
Creativity has been important. Imagination. Design. The ability to see not only what is, but what could be. I have always believed that schools should have soul. They should have identity. They should have texture, tone, symbolism, and life. Not artificial branding pasted on top, but a real spirit that emerges from what the place values and makes possible. Some of the work I have cared about most has not been merely operational. It has been cultural. The shaping of narrative. The symbols. The language. The sense that this school should stand for something and feel like something. Agency and purpose were never meant to be a slogan. They were meant to describe a way of becoming.
But I have also had less helpful tools on me.
Impatience. Fatigue. Distrust when I have seen too many things mishandled. The tendency to take too much on myself when I believe the stakes are high. A willingness to absorb pressure that sometimes slips into over-identification with the work. There have been times when the school was too much in me, and I was too much in it. That is understandable in a founding context, but it is not entirely healthy. When you help build something from near-zero, it enters you. Its condition affects your own condition. Its failures do not feel abstract. Its successes do not feel detached. The line between professional task and personal stake becomes thin.
That is one reason this three-year point feels so significant to me.
Three years is enough time to reveal the truth of things. Not the finished truth, but the real one. Enough time to strip away novelty. Enough time to show who people are under sustained demand. Enough time to see which ideas hold. Enough time to test whether vision can survive contact with reality. Enough time to establish whether the institution is beginning to carry itself or whether it still depends too heavily on force of will.
At this juncture, I do not feel simplistic pride, and I do not feel defeat. I feel something more complex and, I think, more grounded.
I feel respect for what has been built.
I feel gratitude for the people who have genuinely carried it with integrity.
I feel clearer about what matters and what does not.
I feel less interested in performance and more interested in substance.
I feel more convinced than ever that education must resist shallowness.
I feel more aware of the cost of building well.
I feel older in some ways, harder in some places, but also more certain.
There have been successes here that should not be minimized. The school exists. It has grown. It has developed a real presence. It has served children and families meaningfully. It has attracted committed people. It has created programs, events, opportunities, and moments of pride that did not exist before. It has established momentum. It has begun to develop a character of its own. Those are not small things. In a world full of temporary language and inflated claims, it matters to say plainly that something real has been done.
There have also been failures and shortcomings that should not be hidden. Some systems were not ready soon enough. Some decisions should have been better. Some strains were foreseeable and not sufficiently mitigated. Some people were not the right fit. Some communication could have been clearer. Some burdens were carried inefficiently. Some ideals were harder to translate consistently into practice than hoped. These things are part of the record too. They belong in any honest account.
But failure is not always the opposite of success. Sometimes it is part of the cost of making anything substantial in imperfect conditions. What matters is whether one learns honestly, adjusts intelligently, and remains anchored to something more durable than ego.
That may be the deepest question I carry now. Not whether the journey has been successful in the simple sense, but whether it has kept faith with what I believe education is for. Whether the school is becoming a place where young people are not merely managed, but formed. Whether it is becoming a place with standards, warmth, seriousness, aspiration, and room for growth. Whether it is becoming a place where adults are also called upward. Whether, in the middle of all the bureaucracy and pressure and logistics and expansion, something human and worthwhile is still being protected.
I think it is. Not perfectly. Not completely. But genuinely.
As for me, I come to the end of this three-year stretch with fewer illusions and, oddly enough, more conviction. I have seen enough over these years to know that meaningful work is never clean. It is compromised by reality from the beginning. It asks for resilience, restraint, judgment, endurance, and faith. It exposes your weaknesses. It sharpens your strengths. It shows you where you are vain, where you are strong, where you are brittle, and where you still have room to grow.
It has done all of that to me.
And still, I would not call these years a burden alone. They have been among the most consequential years of my professional life. Not because they were comfortable, but because they were real. Because they required the full use of mind, instinct, experience, and character. Because they forced decisions. Because they asked what I actually believe. Because they reminded me that institutions are built person by person, decision by decision, standard by standard, day by day.
There is something sobering in that, but also something hopeful.
At the end of this critical three-year juncture, I do not feel finished. I feel tested. I feel clarified. I feel aware that whatever comes next must be built on firmer wisdom, not just energy. On culture, not just ambition. On people, not just plans. On coherence, not just movement.
Most of all, I feel that this journey has mattered.
It has mattered to the students.
It has mattered to the families.
It has mattered to the staff.
And it has mattered to me.
Not because it has been easy.
Not because it has been tidy.
But because it has been worth doing.
And perhaps that is the clearest thing I can say now.
We built something.
We are still building it.
And so, in some important sense, am I.
Greg Culos,
Osaka, 3/2026