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This Week from Kochi
This week, I’m writing from Kochi, Japan.
Every year, I do a part of the Shikoku Pilgrimage (Ohenro), and this was my third year. From December 25th to 29th, I walked about 110 kilometers across Kochi Prefecture, visiting temples along the way.
The Shikoku Pilgrimage is a sacred journey of 88 temples connected to Kobo Daishi (Kukai), stretching over 1,400 kilometers around the island of Shikoku. Walking the entire route would normally take over 40 days, but since I can’t take that much time off work, I walk for 3–4 days every December, little by little.
So far, I’ve visited 33 out of the 88 temples, and at this pace, it will take me around seven more years to complete the journey — but I’m in no rush. I’d rather take it slowly.
This time, I arrived in Kochi on Wednesday afternoon, walked all day on Thursday and Friday, and half a day on Saturday. On Thursday alone, I walked 39.2 kilometers.
It’s rare to spend an entire day just walking. When you do, your mind starts to wander naturally — reflecting on the past year, planning for the next, and even contemplating deeper questions like “What is human strength?” or “What does happiness mean?”
I’d like to share a few of those thoughts here.
What Is “Human Strength”?
Skills like sales ability or technical expertise can be supplemented by hiring people who are more talented than you.
But human strength — the strength of one’s character — cannot be replaced or delegated.
A company can never grow beyond the capacity of its leaders. That’s why management members are always the potential bottleneck to growth. In the end, beyond domain knowledge or experience, what truly matters is human depth.
So what exactly is human strength?
To me, it’s the scale of a person’s internal measuring stick.
Everything in life — happiness, hardship, success, failure — is relative. Each of us measures the world using our own internal standard. When that internal ruler is short, we can only measure small things. But when it’s long — when we have a clear, steady axis inside us — we can understand and embrace much larger experiences, and even empathize with others’ perspectives.
How do we mark our own ruler and make it longer?
By self-reflection — understanding how we want to live and what we want to accomplish.
And how do we expand it? In one word: by cultivating virtue.
We do that by traveling, encountering new ideas and people, reading books, and studying history.
At Temple No. 32, Zenjibu-ji, I came across a phrase that deeply resonated with this theme:
“Think sincerity in your heart,
speak truth with your mouth,
and act with righteousness in your body.”
It comes from the Buddhist teaching of the Eightfold Path — and I believe it perfectly captures the essence of cultivating virtue.
The Definition of Happiness
When you’re walking for hours with nothing else to do, countless questions surface in your mind.
This time, I walked with Shun Ishikawa and Mr. Fukuyama from Yoake Entertainment, and we had deep conversations about life and work along the way.
I realized that instead of pursuing “universal truths,” it’s more important to have your own solid definition of what happiness means.
For me, happiness is to die with the feeling that I’ve done everything I could — to die satisfied.
There are small joys and hardships along the way, but all of them are just spices that flavor that final moment.
As Natsume Soseki wrote in Nowaki:
“Some may ask how far one intends to walk.
The answer is simple: as far as one can.
When one collapses along the ideal road, looking back on one’s life in a single glance,
only then does true understanding arise.”
If, at the end of my life, I can look back and say, “I walked as far as I could,” then I will have lived a happy life.
What Makes a Strong Team?
I also thought about teams.
Even when people go through the same experience — like walking the same Ohenro path — each person takes away something different. Why is that?
Because each person has their own function, their own equation for interpreting the world — like f(x, y, z) = x + y + z.
The axes (x, y, z) represent what dimensions that person values. Some people live in two dimensions, others in many; some have complex functions, others simple ones.
A strong team is a group of people who share the same core function.
No matter what variables you plug in, if the underlying logic is the same, the outputs align.
In our case, we’ve defined our axes as follows:
x-axis: Purpose — Why we work, why we live
y-axis: Logical thinking
z-axis: Passion and drive
Their priority is x > y > z.
Without purpose, we wouldn’t hire someone, no matter how smart or passionate they are.
Without logic, we couldn’t move in the right direction.
And without passion, we couldn’t move at all.
Purpose gives us direction, logic gives us trajectory, and passion provides thrust.
Finally, we multiply the entire function by a coefficient, α, which represents being a good person.
So the function becomes:
f(x, y, z) = α (x + y + z)
In the end, the most important thing — the one that changes everything — is whether someone is a genuinely good human being.
Words from the Road
Along the way, I came across these words at a temple in Kochi:
“Izokko spirit.
Laugh if you will, call it a dream.
But only I know the path I walk.
To steer Japan’s dawn, I soar the skies and cross the seas,
my blood burning with passion.
A man’s heart should be as vast as the Pacific.
The world is wide — there’s more than one path ahead.
Don’t speak of the past; speak of the future.
If you carry Japan with conviction, it becomes light.
Aspire high, pursue ideals — that is the Izokko spirit of Tosa and Ryoma.”
And finally, at Zenjibu-ji again:
“Think sincerity in your heart,
speak truth with your mouth,
act with righteousness in your body.”
As I watched the sunrise over Katsurahama, I thought:
2025 should be the year of dawn.
Would you like me to make this version sound more like a polished “note article in English” (e.g., with subheadings, flow, and tone adjusted for medium publication)?
I can turn it into a ready-to-publish English blog draft.