What I learned walking 3,600 km (2016–2023)
I walked alone, with no Japanese. Cellular signal disappeared for hours in the mountain valleys. I walked among pilgrims with chronic conditions improvising every day, foreign tourists with no way to communicate medical needs. The lesson: paper is fragile, language is a wall, and offline matters more than people realize.
Lower-density season, often no cellular signal for hours. I started experimenting with offline tools — pre-downloaded maps, offline translation apps, paper backups of everything. The lesson: connectivity is a luxury. Resilience starts with assuming the cloud isn't there.
This time I started thinking like an engineer. I sketched a notebook architecture for an offline health passport. I drew diagrams in temple courtyards. (This was also the year I met my future wife Misako, whom I married six months later in Japan — a personal note that shapes the Belgium ↔ Japan dimension of this project.) The lesson: this is buildable. The pieces exist. The fusion does not. I should make it.
I was in Tokyo preparing my wife's relocation to Belgium when M 7.6 struck. Ten days later I drove solo to Himi (Toyama Prefecture), on the coast neighbouring the Noto Peninsula, to volunteer with the local disaster response — sleeping in my rental car between shifts. The lesson: my hypothetical "what if a foreign pilgrim got hurt?" became a daily reality for hundreds of evacuees. I have a moral obligation to ship this thing.
