Hello, my name is Xavier Barbouche. I'm 24, from Madison, Wisconsin, and I'd like to build my career in Japan. Last year I spent nine months in Minowa, Nagano, teaching English to six hundred students at a local school. Since returning to the U.S., I've worked as Chief Data Analyst at a sports-analytics startup. The two roles taught me the same lesson from opposite sides: good systems and good communication are the same problem.

My Career

My first real job was as a Software Development Intern at Forward Health Group in Madison. For a little over a year I built internal tools and client portals — the kind of work that isn't glamorous but that helps a small team move faster. It was my first experience shipping something real, for real users, under real deadlines.

In August 2024 I moved to Minowa, Nagano, Japan, to teach English at AtoZ Corporation. For nine months I designed lessons for twelve classes and wrote individual progress reports for over six hundred students at widely different proficiency levels. Teaching in Japan taught me more than Japanese: it taught me how communication, precision, and patience actually work inside a Japanese organization.

Since returning to the U.S. in April 2025 I've served as Chief Data Analyst at a sports-attendance networking startup. My job is to take decades of messy college-football attendance data — paper-first, inconsistent, organized by whoever kept the binder — and turn it into a clean, queryable layer the app can use. I also set the architecture that integrates the legacy numbers with the real-time feeds from games happening now.

Why Japan

My interest in Japan is not theoretical. I studied Japanese for four semesters at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Japanese culture for another two. I visited twice before moving, and then spent nine months in a small town in Nagano. I left wanting to return — not out of nostalgia, but with purpose: a real job, at a company I respected, with a role I could grow into over years, not months.

Brief Background

I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and did my undergrad at the University of Colorado Boulder before transferring home to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I studied economics there, with an emphasis on econometrics — the part that forces you to be honest with messy real-world data.

Outside of work, I'm interested in how tools — especially the current generation of AI systems — change what a small team can do. I'm continuing to improve my Japanese, and I spend weekends with friends and family.

Interests

Sports

American football — the Minnesota Vikings and the Wisconsin Badgers. International soccer — I follow the UEFA European Championship and the FIFA World Cup closely.

Video Games

I regularly play a variety of games. Find me on Discord as xlbluefish.

Media

Anime: Horimiya and Jujutsu Kaisen. Movies: The Big Short and The Martian.