Mr. Mason earned both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Cornell University. As a graduate student his main interest was Chinese and Japanese pedagogy.  His affiliation with Cornell’s Full-year Asian Language Concentration (FALCON) Program and their Teacher Training Workshop has been an essential element in his study of Asian language pedagogy.

Mr. Mason, who speaks Japanese and Chinese, taught high school in Massachusetts for several months before becoming a high school teacher in Japan where he was given his own class of Japanese students and made a homeroom teacher — a rare position for a foreigner to attain. He later went on to hold the rank of assistant professor at Bunsei University of Art where he taught before accepting a prestigious fellowship from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education to study at National Taiwan University. While at Bunsei University, Mr. Mason was a participant-observer in the intense campaign to re-elect Michiko Ueno, the only sitting LDP female in Tochigi, to her Senate seat. She won and is now a member of the national Diet in Tokyo. It is thought that Mr. Mason is the only foreigner in recent history to have been actively included in a key political figure’s center circle during an election.

Away from work Mr. Mason enjoys cycling, photography, and learning the names of NHK announcers (Japan’s national broadcasting network). When he is not in the air above the Pacific, he splits his time between Lunenburg, MA,  and Shanghai, China.