That One Sentence Changed My Life
Speaking the truth saves people.
I learned that from a phone call I received in university.
Eighteen months of silence
I was enrolled in a seminar taught by a visiting professor from another university. Every week during that seminar, that professor touched my body without my consent. For a year and a half. Every week.
And yet I said nothing. Not to my mother. Not to anyone.
I wanted so badly to keep learning that I could not bring myself to leave. Eventually, my body began to speak for me. Before every session, I was hit with headaches and stomachaches. Still, I kept going.
The one sentence that saved me
One day, a male classmate from the same seminar called me. He was calm, serious — someone who had never called me before.
He told me, directly and without softening it, that the professor had stated his intention to sexually assault me, in front of other students.
In that moment, I was able to recognize what was happening as reality for the first time. I told my mother. I stopped going to the seminar. That phone call protected me.
Why I have kept doing this work
From the age of 22, when I joined a multinational corporation, I consistently worked to build the systems and culture that allow truth to travel inside organizations.
At 29, I designed, implemented, and operated a large-scale system that brought frontline realities and organizational truth directly to the president. I went on to deepen that practice across multiple multinational corporations, including academic research through my master’s thesis (2014, Gifu University) on why truth fails to reach leadership inside organizations.
There were many difficult times. But underneath everything, what kept me going was a deep sense of gratitude toward the person who made that call.
A confession
For more than 30 years, I have done work centered on the message: speak the truth. And yet, for all that time, there was something I could not say about myself.
When I left corporate life at 53, I started a YouTube channel. The name: “53 years without a boyfriend!”
One day, I looked into the camera and said it out loud.
In that moment, pure joy surged through my entire body — a sensation of everything inside me opening up and connecting, all the way out to the universe. I have not had a single cold since.
Speaking the truth makes your body healthier. I know this because I felt it in my own body. (For the scientific explanation of why this happens, see here)
This is why I do this work
To build a world where anyone can speak the truth with ease. To create, on the side of organizations and society, the structural conditions that make speaking the truth safe.
One day, I hope to find the person who made that call and tell him: “Because of what you said, I have been able to do this work.”
That phone call stayed with me for thirty years. Inside every organization I entered, the same question followed me: why doesn’t truth move — and who pays the cost when it doesn’t?
→ What I mean by mottainai — thirty years of watching that cost
You can begin anonymously.
The truth already exists inside your organization.
Ready to build the structure to use it?