What Became of the Ph.D.?

In March 2014, I wrote a blog post I called “Ph.D. Calling.” I ended it with a question:

I ask now not how one becomes a Ph.D., but what is to become one?

At that time, I did not know how literally life would ask me to answer it.

Not long afterward, I left my full-time position as Associate Professor at Ateneo de Davao University. I had already found my place there. I was teaching in the Language Department and the Graduate School, handling courses in language learning theories, research, discourse analysis, and Japanese. I had also begun mentoring doctoral students who were wrestling with their own dissertations. After years of studying, teaching, and trying to prove that I deserved a place in academe, I had finally reached a position that looked secure.

Then I left.

It was not because I had stopped loving the university. Nor was it because another academic opportunity was waiting for me somewhere else. I left because my youngest son had chosen a different direction for his life.

My two sons were born in Japan, and they are Japanese. Yet they had spent almost all the years they could remember in the Philippines. When we brought them there, my eldest was only four. My youngest was just a little over one year old. I raised them in the Philippines for fifteen years, surrounded by Filipino life, family, language, noise, warmth, and all the familiar disorder that becomes home.

But my youngest did not want to pursue university in the Philippines. He wanted to return to Japan. Perhaps more than returning, he wanted to discover what it meant to live as a Japanese person in the country where he had been born.

The truth was that he did not know what kind of life awaited him there.

Neither did I.

A father sometimes follows a road before he knows where it leads. I followed my son to Japan, leaving behind not only a university but also the academic person I had struggled to become. I crossed the sea carrying a doctorate that suddenly seemed to weigh differently. In Davao, people knew my position, my work, and something of the long journey behind the letters after my name. In Japan, none of those things spoke for me.

I had to become a teacher again.

The crossing was not a walk in the park. Applying to teach at a Japanese university was itself an education—one that no doctoral program had prepared me for. There were unfamiliar expectations, carefully prepared documents, interviews, demonstration lessons, and questions asked in a professional culture I was still trying to understand. I had qualifications, experience, and a doctorate, but these could not automatically open a classroom door.

My first foothold was in an eikaiwa, an English conversation school. I also began teaching at a business and language college in Tokyo, initially as an assistant teacher. The word assistant quietly reminded me of how far I had moved from the position I had left behind.

Still, I worked.

I watched. I adjusted. I tried to understand the students before expecting them to understand me. I learned the pace of the classroom, the silences, the hesitations, and the ways Japanese learners could be present without making their presence immediately visible.

After one semester at the business college, I was entrusted with classes of my own. I was no longer there only to support another teacher. Little by little, through the work itself, I had shown that this Filipino teacher could do more than assist. I could stand before the class, take responsibility for it, and teach.

There was no dramatic announcement. The change came quietly, as many important changes do. But for me, it mattered. I was slowly rebuilding an academic identity in a country where I had arrived almost unknown.

Then Showa Women’s University came.

The selection process was grueling. There was the formal interview, the demonstration lesson, and the question-and-answer session that followed. I entered carrying the usual nervousness of an applicant, but also something more difficult to name: the need to prove that the teacher they saw before them was not diminished by where he came from.

As a Filipino English teacher in Japan, one becomes conscious of how quickly people may place teachers into categories. Native speaker. Non-native speaker. Main teacher. Assistant teacher. Sometimes the labels enter the room before the person does.

But one of the department heads had studied English in Cebu and had experienced Filipino teaching firsthand. She knew something about what Filipino teachers could bring into a classroom—the attentiveness, adaptability, warmth, persistence, and human closeness that do not always appear on a curriculum vitae. Perhaps that experience allowed her to see me beyond the usual labels. Perhaps, in her own way, she helped open a door that might otherwise have remained closed.

After the interview, one of the department heads accompanied me to the elevator. Before the doors closed, she told me not to accept invitations for interviews from other universities yet. I should wait for their decision.

She did not say that I had been accepted.

But I heard something between her words.

As the elevator descended, I thought, I got the job.

Showa became more than another line on my résumé. It became one of the places where I began to understand what teaching English in Japan truly required. The students were different from those I had known in the Philippines. Their personalities did not always reveal themselves quickly. Some avoided speaking because they feared making grammatical mistakes. Some were uncomfortable being singled out. Others had studied English for years but had seldom experienced what it meant to keep a conversation alive without memorized lines.

For about two years, I was still finding my way into the Japanese educational scheme. I tried to merge into it without losing the teacher I had been. I adjusted, but I also questioned. I learned to respect the silence, but I did not want my students to remain imprisoned within it. I learned to appreciate structure, but I also saw how too much preparation could prevent genuine conversation from ever beginning.

The doctorate had taught me to study learners. Japan was teaching me to listen to them.

My early response was what I later called “Teacher-Led Small Talk.” I asked accessible questions, modeled possible answers, and gave hesitant students a safer place to begin speaking. It worked. Students spoke more willingly and worried less about producing perfect English.

But something was still missing.

When the familiar language ran out, the conversation often stopped. Students could answer a question, but they did not always know how to move beyond it. They waited for the teacher or their partner to ask the next question. Their English had words, but it did not yet have enough room to wander.

That realization stayed with me.

Over nearly six years, I continued changing the practice. I revised instructions, added supports, removed supports, watched where conversations broke down, and tried again. What eventually became Nariyuki ni Makaseru was not born in one inspired moment. It was forged through continuous classroom work—through unsuccessful activities, small breakthroughs, student hesitations, unexpected laughter, and conversations that sometimes found a life of their own.

Nariyuki ni Makaseru means “letting things take their natural course.” Yet there was nothing effortless about its development. Before students could let a conversation flow, I had to build the conditions that would make such freedom possible. They needed structure before spontaneity, reassurance before risk, and repeated experiences of being understood even when their English was imperfect.

Perhaps I needed the same things.

When I followed my son to Japan, I thought I was helping him find the life he wanted. He had been born here but raised in the Philippines, and he wanted to know what it meant to live as Japanese. I worried about him stepping into a country he knew by birth but not yet by experience.

What I did not know was that I, too, would have to find myself here.

Japan slowly stripped away the assurances I had carried from Davao. My title could not introduce me. My doctorate could not stand before a class in my place. The academic life I had painstakingly built could not protect me from being regarded first as an assistant, or from wondering whether a Filipino teacher would be trusted with a classroom of his own.

There were days when I must have asked myself, silently, what had happened to the professor I had been. Had I left him behind? Had the journey reduced me—or had it merely removed the things behind which I had learned to stand?

In the Japanese classroom, I could not depend upon who I had been. I had to prove myself in smaller ways: in the patience to wait through a student’s silence, in the instinct to recognize fear behind a lowered face, in the gesture that encouraged one more sentence, and in the warmth that told a hesitant learner, Your imperfect English is welcome here.

The students did not need my title. They needed me to understand why they could not speak.

For years, I kept returning to that silence. I listened to it, taught through it, and sometimes failed before it. I changed my questions, my demonstrations, my expectations, and even my understanding of what a successful conversation should sound like. Slowly, the silence began to answer—not always with perfect sentences, but with laughter, unfinished thoughts, unexpected stories, and English that was finally alive.

Out of those voices, Nariyuki ni Makaseru gradually took form.

It was not a monument I had crossed the sea intending to build. It came from necessity—from my students’ struggle to speak and my own struggle to become a teacher they could trust. In teaching them to move beyond fear and allow a conversation to find its course, perhaps I was also learning how to let my own life do the same.