A young bushi packed his bokken, tied his sandals and walked out into the world on musha shugyō – sometimes for years, sometimes forever.

The road left the small town along a narrow path between rice paddies still wet with the night’s dew. Dawn was grey and quiet, as it tends to be at the turn of summer and autumn in the provinces of northern Honshū under the Tokugawa shōgunate. A young man stood at the last gate – a plain wooden gate that separated the courtyard of his family home from the rest of the world. He wore a cotton kosode in faded indigo, tucked into hakama tied below the knees, a straw sugegasa hat hanging on his back, and two swords at his belt – a daishō, the pair without which a bushi was not a bushi. On his shoulder he carried a bundle of provisions that would last three days at most. His mother stood in the doorway. She did not cry – she was a warrior’s wife and knew that tears make a worse farewell than silence. His father was already dead. His elder brother served at the castle. He, the younger son, had nothing but a pair of swords and a family name.

The journey he was setting out on was not a trip. A trip has a destination and a return date. What awaited him beyond the gate had neither. The martial schools he was heading for lay scattered across all of Japan – in castle settlements, mountain valleys, towns along back roads. The paths leading to them wound through forests and mountain passes, and the only roof over one’s head was a peasant’s goodwill or the porch of an abandoned house. Straw sandals fell apart after three days of marching. Money – if he had any at all – ran out even faster. To survive, he would guard merchant caravans, teach village children to write, do manual labour for a handful of copper coins. This was not the image he had carried in his head when he walked away from the gate. But the road makes short work of expectations. Some of those who set out on the same path returned after two or three years with scars, certificates and a story to tell. Many never returned at all.

There is a temptation to tell this story as a legend of courage – a great sword master sets out into the world, defeats his rivals, returns wiser. But a legend is comfortable because it does not ask uncomfortable questions. What makes a man in his early twenties voluntarily choose months of hunger, sleeping rough and the daily risk that someone stronger will crack his skull with a wooden sword? Courage? Desperation? The pressure of an environment in which not setting out means admitting you are not good enough? Or perhaps simply a lack of better options – because in a society that has just ended the multi-generational war of Sengoku, a young warrior with no land, no patron and no combat experience is not merely unimportant. He is something worse: he is redundant. Let us set out with him – but the way it really was, not the way the legends would have it.

The monks walked first – where the idea of wandering with a sword came from

Before young warriors with swords took to the roads of Japan, monks had walked them. The tradition of angya (行脚, lit. “walking on foot”) – the ascetic wandering of Zen Buddhist monks – had been practised in Japan long before anyone gave it a military inflection. A monk would leave the monastery without money, carrying a begging bowl, and walk – from temple to temple, from master to master. The goal was not geographic. The goal was enlightenment, which – according to Zen – comes not through meditation under a roof but through collision with discomfort, hunger and the solitary silence of a mountain path. Bodily suffering was meant to purify the mind. Japanese warriors, who for centuries had lived in close spiritual proximity to Zen temples, recognised in this practice something they understood well: that the true test of a person takes place not at home, but on the road.

The first documented shugyōsha (修行者) – warrior-pilgrim – is often said to be Tsukahara Bokuden, the legendary swordsman of the Sengoku period. Bokuden set out on his musha shugyō around 1506, at the age of seventeen. It should be noted, however, that Bokuden does not fit the romantic image of the lone wanderer. He was an aristocrat among warriors, the son of a priest at the Kashima Shrine, raised in two powerful martial families. He set out on his journey with a retinue – on horseback, with servants and supplies. His thirty-seven duels cannot be compared with the experience of a provincial lad who set out with a single bokken and a handful of hoshi-ii (干し飯 – dried cooked rice, eaten dry or after soaking in water). Bokuden marks the beginning of the tradition, but an aristocratic beginning. The mass practice of musha shugyō – the kind that touched thousands of nameless men – was born later, from an entirely different source: desperation.

After the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and the establishment of the Tokugawa shōgunate, Japan entered an era that changed everything – but not immediately and not evenly. Early Edo, the first three or four decades of the seventeenth century, was a time of residual chaos within an ordering world. Thousands of warriors were left without masters. Clans defeated at Sekigahara – dissolved, decimated, their estates confiscated. Their bushi (武士, warriors) became rōnin (浪人 – masterless samurai) overnight: men with martial skills, honour to uphold and not a penny to their name. Such a man had four options. He could commit seppuku. He could humble himself and become a peasant. He could turn to banditry. Or he could set out on musha shugyō – a journey that offered the chance to build a reputation, earn a certificate from a martial school and – if fortune favoured – find employment under a new daimyō. It was a gamble with one’s life. But the alternative was either a swift death by a cut to the belly, or a slow one: of hunger or of dignity.

A bundle, two swords and a document with a seal – how one travelled

Nobody could simply walk out of the gate and set off. The system of population movement control in the Edo period – though still porous in its early decades – required every samurai leaving the borders of his domain to have written permission from the authorities of his han (more on the Tokugawa transport system can be found here: A day at the sekisho checkpoint station. How the shogunate ruled by procedure, not by the sword ). The document served a dual purpose: it was both a pass and an insurance. A pass – because at sekisho (関所), checkpoint stations positioned along the main roads, guards checked who was passing and where. Insurance – because a document bearing a clan’s seal separated a wandering shugyōsha from a fugitive or a vagabond. Without it, a young warrior on the road was nobody – at best a suspect, at worst a rōnin to be arrested. And later, as the shōgunate tightened its grip, obtaining such permission became increasingly difficult. By the mid-Edo period, many han simply stopped granting it.

What did a shugyōsha take with him? Let us imagine the morning ritual of packing. Two swords – katana and wakizashi – at the belt, obligatory, for they were the mark of belonging to the warrior caste. A wooden training sword, the bokken (木剣), or the heavier suburitō (素振り刀, lit. “swinging sword”), for daily practice on the road. Sometimes a naginata or a spear, though carrying polearms made travel cumbersome. Clothing: a cotton kosode (小袖), hakama (袴) tied below the knees with cord to keep them from tangling during the march, and a straw sugegasa (菅笠) hat, which offered protection from sun and rain but also allowed one to hide one’s face when the situation called for it. On the back – a bundle wrapped in furoshiki (風呂敷), a cloth kerchief pulled into a knot. Inside: a handful of rice, dried herring, a flint for making fire, cord, sometimes some twine for waraji (草鞋) sandals. That was all. Supplies for three, at most five days. After that, one had to find food, earn it or endure without it.

The roads of early Edo, so soon after the wars, were unsafe. Major routes such as the Tōkaidō connecting Edo with Kyoto offered post stations, inns and food vendors. But a shugyōsha rarely walked the main road. Martial schools were scattered across all of Japan – in small towns, castle settlements, mountain valleys. The paths to them led through forests, passes and villages where the only roof overhead was a temple or a peasant’s kindness. Some shugyōsha slept under bridges, on the verandas of abandoned houses, in barns. The nights were long, rain was frequent, and a band of forest brigands made no distinction between a merchant and a wandering warrior. A sword after a hard day’s march is a different thing from a sword in the training hall.

A shugyōsha woke under the porch of a peasant’s house by the road. The owner stood on the path with a hoe and watched him in silence – no greeting, no chasing away. A stranger with two swords at his belt was not the kind of guest you invite inside, but nor the kind you shoo away without ceremony. Rain has been falling since dawn. The waraji sandals, woven from rice straw, have soaked through and are coming apart – one pair lasts three or four days of marching, then you have to weave new ones or buy them from a roadside craftsman for a few copper coins. Blisters on aching feet. Breakfast – a handful of yesterday’s cooked rice, cold and sticky. The road to the nearest martial school he heard about from another wanderer leads north, through the forest, two more days’ march. The sky is the colour of lead. The road is empty.

And here we arrive at a subject the legends are silent about: money. The journey lasted months, sometimes years. Those who had financial support from their family could afford an unhurried pace. The rest – the overwhelming majority – had to earn. Shugyōsha took on all manner of work: they guarded merchant caravans, served as bodyguards at markets, taught children in villages to read and do arithmetic (a surprisingly common occupation – I have no idea why it is completely ignored by popular culture), and in the worst moments they did manual labour. Being a hired bodyguard for a handful of copper coins was not the picture the young man had carried in his head when he left the family gate. He surely dreamed of epic victories and glory. But the road is quick to correct one’s expectations. Those who could not find a source of income either turned back or drifted into darker trades – the kind that were never recorded in any certificate.

Standing in a stranger’s doorway – a ritual game of life and reputation

The heart of musha shugyō beat in the training halls. A shugyōsha wandered not to admire the scenery – he wandered from dōjō to dōjō. Every martial school he reached was a test: of his skill, his courage, his courtesy. For one could not simply walk in and say: “Come on, let’s fight.” The ritual etiquette of the challenge had its rules, and breaking them could end worse than losing. Let us not forget – we are in Japan, where ritual is everything.

The typical scenario went as follows: the wanderer would stand before the entrance to the dōjō and ask to meet the master or his deputy. He would introduce himself – name, alias if he had one, the school from which he came, the purpose of his visit. If received, he would make a formal request for taryū jiai (他流試合, lit. “combat encounter with another school”). This was the crux of the matter: not a brawl, not aggression, but a controlled duel between representatives of two different martial traditions. The host master could accept the challenge in person, could designate a student or could refuse – the last option was not especially honourable but neither was it forbidden (sometimes a master, out of pity for the pitiful state of the challenger, would decline to fight him). Duels took place inside the training hall: sandals removed, a bow, choice of weapon.

Here one must distinguish between three different phenomena that historical sources often mention, though they are easily confused. Taryū jiai was a formal contest – two schools, two representatives, a result. Tameshi-ai (試試合, lit. “trial encounter”) was something closer to a joint training session: winning was not the main point; what mattered more was seeing how another technique worked and drawing conclusions. And dōjō yaburi (道場破り, lit. “breaking the training hall”) was an entirely different matter: a brutal attempt to destroy the reputation of an entire school, risking the master’s loss of students, employment and even the kanban (看板) sign hanging above the door (I wrote more about this here: ……………………). In practice, genuine dōjō yaburi was rare (though it predominates in samurai cinema) – the first two forms were far more common. Period sources such as the memoirs of Katsu Kokichi describe courteous visits full of formality rather than bloody raids.

The training weapon of early Edo was the bokken – a wooden sword, hard, solid and deadly serious. It was no prop. A bokken blow to the head fractured the skull. To the temple – it killed. To the hand – it crushed the metacarpal bones so that a warrior could never again grip a sword firmly. Some went further – duels with real blades occurred into the mid-seventeenth century, though the shōgunate tried to limit them. It was only in late Edo, during the Tenpō period (the 1830s), that protective equipment bōgu (防具) and swords made of bamboo slats, shinai (竹刀), became widespread, permitting full-contact fighting without mortal risk. It was precisely this innovation that lifted the long-standing ban on taryū jiai – the shōgunate accepted that if people were not dying, they could train between schools as they wished. But in early Edo, in the golden age of musha shugyō, no such protection existed. Every duel carried the risk of crippling injury and death. Every blow was real.

And what if you lost? A wound to the body had a chance to heal. A wound to one’s reputation did not. A shugyōsha who kept losing fights was losing the only capital he had: others’ faith in his abilities. No daimyō would employ a warrior about whom word had spread that he was recovering from his third consecutive defeat. No school would issue a certificate to someone who had not proved himself in combat. Losing was not the end of physical life – but it could be the end of the life a shugyōsha wanted to lead. And that is precisely why some, rather than return in disgrace, simply did not return. They stayed in a province where nobody knew them and started over under a different name.

There is another kind of defeat, one the sources speak of. A young man comes to a school, steps up to fight and wins – but the host master watches and says: “Good technique. Nothing more.” The young man has won, but he has not made an impression. He has received no invitation for further training, no offer to study, no certificate. He won the fight and lost everything else. This kind of defeat – quiet, without blood, without broken bones – was perhaps the hardest to swallow. A sword can be sharpened. Washing off the stain of mediocrity is far more difficult.

Scrolls that weighed more than a sword – the certification system of martial schools

Musha shugyō was not a romantic vagabondage. It had a measurable objective – and that objective was a document. Japanese martial schools, ryūha (流派, lit. “current”, “stream of tradition”), developed during the Edo period a multi-tiered certification system that regulated not only the right to teach but effectively a warrior’s entire career. It was not a state system – each school had its own nomenclature and criteria – but the general logic was common to all.

At the bottom of the hierarchy stood okuiri-sho (奥入書) – a certificate of entry into the deeper parts of the school’s curriculum, a declaration, as it were, that the student had earned access to less trivial techniques. Above it sat mokuroku (目録) – a register of techniques the adept had mastered; a physical document, usually a makimono (巻物), a handwritten scroll listing forms and their names. A mokuroku confirmed that the warrior had completed full basic training. But this was still only the beginning of the road. The next level – menkyo (免許, lit. “licence”) – granted the right to teach on behalf of the school. And finally, at the very top: menkyo kaiden (免許皆伝, lit. “licence of full transmission”). This last certificate meant that the master had transmitted to the student everything – every technique, every secret, every principle. The entire tradition, the entire soul.

Menkyo kaiden was as rare as a diamond and just as coveted. Many masters issued no more than one such certificate in their entire lives – to the person they considered most worthy of continuing their work. Others never issued one at all, taking their secrets to the grave. It was precisely this that led many adepts to open their own schools after obtaining mokuroku or menkyo, without waiting for a full transmission that might never come. And this, too, is one of the reasons musha shugyō was so important: the journey allowed one to collect certificates from different schools, which strengthened one’s reputation more effectively than any single scroll. A young warrior who returned with a mokuroku from three different masters in three different provinces was somebody. One who returned empty-handed was not perhaps a nobody, but still had to prove that the road had taught him something.

The moment of receiving a certificate is a scene that the sources I know do not describe, but one that is easy to imagine. The master, who has been observing the shugyōsha for weeks or months, leads him to a separate room. On a low table lies a scroll. The master presents it with both hands. The adept accepts it with a bow, examines the seal, reads his own name inscribed beside the names of the techniques he has mastered. At that moment he holds in his hands the proof that all of it – the months of hunger, the nights under bridges, the blow after which he could not turn his head for two weeks – had meaning. Paper weighs very little. But this scroll seems to weigh his entire life.

Musashi and those who have no monument

Every text about musha shugyō must eventually arrive at Miyamoto Musashi. Of course. He is the archetype – the man who made a philosophy of wandering and a tool of self-knowledge of the sword. Between 1605 and 1612 Musashi traversed Japan from end to end, fighting dozens of duels, the most famous of which – against Sasaki Kojirō on the island of Ganryū – he ended with a single blow from an oar carved into a wooden sword. Decades later he retired to the cave of Reigandō and wrote “Go Rin no Sho” – “The Book of Five Rings”, a treatise on strategy still read today. Musashi is the perfect hero. Perfect, and therefore – I must say – false as a model of the typical experience.

Musashi was a genius, an exception, a standard deviation so far from the norm that using him as a model of musha shugyō is like describing the profession of a painter using Leonardo da Vinci as the example. The typical shugyōsha was no genius. He was a young man in his early twenties from a small han, trained in one technique, with one style, an average build and ambitions greater than his talent. He set out not because he yearned for enlightenment but because he had no employment, and his elder brother had taken everything their father left behind. Every such young man dreamed of coming back a hero. Most – if they came back at all – returned in silence, with scars and the knowledge that they were average. And that, too, was a lesson. The road does not promise greatness. The road promises truth about oneself – and truth is rarely spectacular.

And those who did not return? We know least about them, because nobody recorded their stories. A shugyōsha who died on a back road – from a wound that became infected, from the fever of exposure, from a bokken blow to the kidney that caused internal bleeding, from common dysentery in a world without antibiotics – ended up in a communal grave beside a temple or under a fence. There are no mortality statistics for musha shugyō. There is no list of those who went out and never came back. There is only the silence of the sources – and silence in Japanese history usually means that reality was too commonplace or too painful to record.

What truly drove them onto the road? Psychology answers the question more cautiously than samurai legends would like. Some set out with genuine passion – from love of the sword, from curiosity, from the desire to see Japan with their own eyes. Some – from social pressure: in caste-bound Japan, inaction was worse than failure. Anyone who did not set out when he could was publicly admitting that he was afraid. And fear in the world of the bushi was a mortal sin. There were also those who went out of desperation: without a master, without land, without prospects. For them musha shugyō was not a pilgrimage – nor was it a choice: it was a homeless wandering that could be dressed in honourable words. And perhaps their courage was the most human of all – not the courage of choice, but the courage to go on living when there was no alternative whatsoever.

There was one more reason, one the sources mention between the lines: a hunger for experience. A young man from a provincial han knew his village, his lord’s castle, the road to the nearest market town. He had never seen the ocean if he had been born in the island’s interior. He had never seen mountains if he had been born on the plains. Seventeenth-century Japan was an unimaginably local country by our twenty-first-century standards – a peasant could live his entire life without going more than ten ri from his place of birth. For a samurai setting out on the road, each new province was another world: a different dialect, a different way of tying the obi, a different shape of roof, different trees on the hills. This shock of diversity changed people – not only warriors, but anyone who had the courage to walk far enough. And this is something that cannot be acquired in a training hall, even the finest in the world.

Bunbu ryōdō – the sword and the brush on the same road

Late evening in a small temple by a mountain road. A shugyōsha sits by candlelight on a wooden veranda. He has stretched his aching legs, washed his feet in the stream, eaten a bowl of rice the monks gave him. His swords lie nearby, within reach. The young man takes a brush and a small piece of ink from his bundle. He dissolves the ink on a stone, bends over a piece of paper and writes. Not a letter – for nobody is waiting for him. Not a diary – for paper is too expensive for daily entries. One sentence, perhaps two: an observation from the road, a thought that came to him during the march. He practises calligraphy – brushstrokes that are closer to the movements of a sword than might seem to someone who has never held either.

There is an aspect of musha shugyō that is often forgotten when the focus falls on swords and duels. A shugyōsha was not merely a fighting machine. The philosophy of bunbu ryōdō (文武両道, lit. “the way of the brush and the sword”) – the ideal according to which a true warrior must be as accomplished in the cultural arts as in combat – gave the journey a deeper dimension. A wanderer who reached a town did not look only for a dōjō. He also visited temples – not out of touristic curiosity but with the intention of practice. He made offerings on sacred mountains. He practised calligraphy. He composed verse. Wandering warriors followed the same trails as shugendō pilgrims and mountain ascetics yamabushi – their paths intertwined, and the boundary between a military and a spiritual journey was far thinner than samurai films suggest.

This coexisting spiritual and cultural dimension was important for very practical reasons. Daimyō looking to recruit people for their service did not want crude strongmen: they wanted educated men, capable of conducting correspondence, managing warehouses, negotiating with merchants from other domains. A samurai of early Edo had to be both warrior and administrator – and musha shugyō shaped both dimensions. A man who had walked through several provinces on foot, who had had to cope with hunger, strangers, the bureaucracy of sekisho, linguistic differences between regions and his own fear – returned as someone entirely different. Not only better with a sword. More experienced, more resourceful, harder to surprise.

Here lies a deeper truth about musha shugyō that is missed when one views it only through the prism of duels. It was not merely a test of fighting. It was a test of a person. The road tested not only how fast you could draw your sword, but also how you react when it has been raining for four days straight and you have nowhere to sleep. How you treat the peasant who gave you shelter. Whether you can say thank you. Whether you can win and not lose yourself. Zen monks had known this for a long time: “shugyō” means “ascetic practice”, but also “work on the self”. And it was the second meaning that mattered more.

Decline, revival and metamorphosis

As the Tokugawa shōgunate consolidated its power, musha shugyō gradually faded. Control over population mobility tightened with each decade – domains grew increasingly reluctant to let their warriors travel, and inter-school duels with real weapons were banned. Dōjō changed from dynamic arenas of clashing traditions into closed, hermetic institutions. Kenjutsu was evolving – without regular encounters between schools, techniques became increasingly academic, ever less grounded in practice. By the mid-eighteenth century, musha shugyō was largely a memory.

And then, in a manner typical of Japanese history, the tradition revived – precisely when it was needed. In the 1830s, during the Tenpō period, unease began to grow. Foreign ships were appearing in Japanese waters with increasing frequency. A question arose that Japan had been running from for two centuries: what would happen when they came? Across the country’s domains, military training programmes were intensified. Samurai once again set out on pilgrimages – this time with permits easier to obtain, for the authorities understood that military stagnation was a threat.

From this late revival comes one of the most valuable sources on musha shugyō in general: the diary of Muta Takaatsu from the Saga domain. Muta, a swordsman from the province of Hizen, kept a detailed journal of his training journey, known as “Shokoku Kaireki Nikki” (諸国廻歴日記). He recorded not only the outcomes of his bouts but also the names of schools he visited, the number of rounds won and lost, the conduct of host masters, conditions on the road. It is a priceless document because it shows musha shugyō as it truly was: not a legend, not a myth, but daily, painstaking work on oneself, interspersed with routine, exhaustion and moments of genuine fear. Muta honestly recorded his defeats. And that is precisely why his diary is trustworthy.

The end of musha shugyō was the end of the world that had created it. The Meiji Restoration in 1868 abolished the domain system. The Haitōrei (廃刀令) edict of 1876 prohibited wearing swords in public. The samurai class ceased to exist – irrevocably. The roads that shugyōsha had walked remained – but nobody walked them any longer with a sword in hand and scrolls of martial schools at the belt. Some old ryūha survived in hiding, others vanished. The tradition of taryū jiai passed into the world of kendō, where it lives on today, though in a form nearly unrecognisable to anyone from the seventeenth century.

But the metaphor endured. In contemporary Japan the word shugyōsha is used for students going abroad on scholarships. A corporation sending a young employee to a difficult provincial branch says he is going on shugyō. A young chef who leaves his master’s restaurant and travels to another city to study under someone else is carrying out the musha shugyō of his own craft. Everything has changed except the core: you leave the place you know, you face an unfamiliar world, and you either come back stronger or you do not come back at all. The sword has been replaced by a suitcase, the dōjō by a conference room, the bokken by a PowerPoint presentation. But the exhaustion, the loneliness and the fear are similar.

Return, or not

The young man who stood at dawn by the wooden gate of his family home could not have known how his road would end. He did not know whether he would return with a certificate or with a scar. He did not know whether he would return at all. He knew one thing: that if he did not go, he would remain forever the man who could have gone but did not. And that was worse than defeat. Worse than a scar. Perhaps even worse than death on the road.

There is something in this tradition that we cannot grasp by looking only at swords and duels. Shugyō – the part of the word that means “asceticism”, “work on the self” – does not end on the road. It ends at the moment of return. The man who stands again before the gate of his family home after four or eight years – gaunt, sun-darkened, with a new scar on his forearm and scrolls in his bundle – is no longer the same man who left. His mother may still be standing in the doorway. But now it is he who knows something she does not: the taste of a meal after a week of hunger, the face of a stranger standing opposite you in order to kill you, and how slowly time passes when you lie under a tree barefoot in the rain with a fever and do not know whether you will last until morning.

The question I pose at the end is not about the samurai. It is about us. Each of us has their own musha shugyō – a moment in which we stand at the gate and decide whether to go out. Courage is not always a grand gesture. Sometimes it is simply tying your sandals and walking, even though what lies ahead is a vast unknown that frightens you. But you walk.

SOURCES

1. Sala Ivars, Marcos A. “Musha Shugyō: The Warrior Pilgrimage”, Journal of Asian Martial Arts, No. 18-4, 2009.

2. Miyamoto Musashi, “The Book of Five Rings” (Gorin no Sho), trans. Agnieszka Żuławska-Umeda, Diamond Books, 2001.

3. Friday, Karl F. “Legacies of the Sword: The Kashima-Shinryū and Samurai Martial Culture”, 1997.

4. Turnbull, Stephen. “The Samurai Swordsman: Master of War”, 2008.

5. Tokitsu, Kenji. “Miyamoto Musashi: His Life and Writings”, 2004.

6. 牟田高敦 『諸国廻歴日記』、佐賀藩史料集成、幕末編.

"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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