William Atsushi Bailey

Born in Japan

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. Growing up between Japan and Canada, I learned two ways of seeing. One reads the whole scene first: the setting, the relationships, what goes unsaid. The other goes straight to the subject and its details. Holistic and analytical, context and specifics. Neither is wrong, and I’ve learned to hold both. Context isn’t background. It’s the whole story.

University & Athletics

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.

Hospitality

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.

MSc & Events

London was the shift. From experiencing moments to creating them. A Master’s in International Event Management, with Distinction. A dissertation on esports that won the faculty award for the best written dissertation of my year. Agency work with emc3 that tested everything I’d learned. The gap between theory and craft started closing here.

Entrepreneurship

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.

Producer

At Boombox, the chapters converged. LCS, X Games, the Magic: The Gathering World Championship. Each franchise demanded a different thing, but the core skill was the same: protecting global IP while adapting it across markets and formats.

It’s also where I learned to work inside the brand bibles of Riot, EA, Red Bull and Wizards of the Coast, and to tell the rules that carry a brand from the ones that can flex.

My role sat between brands and audiences, vision and execution. Production, it turned out, was storytelling, just with higher stakes and tighter deadlines.

The Practice

Back in Tokyo. Creative producer and strategist on PlayStation’s State of Play 日本 in 2025, and again in 2026. The title changes depending on who’s asking. The aim doesn’t: an idea that means the right thing to the people it’s for.