TL;DR
Last night I attended an India–Japan co-creation pitch event hosted by Deloitte Tohmatsu in Marunouchi, Tokyo. 10+ startups, ranging from orbital debris removal to next-gen yoga mats. I went there on 30 hours of no sleep because I couldn't stop coding. I am not proud of this. This post is part lessons from the room, part open letter to fellow solo developers about the body that runs all of our code.
The Setup
I'm a solo-leaning founder shipping in Rust, TypeScript, and Solidity. I run Jon & Coo Inc., Matsuri Platform, and a few related projects. When I get into a deep build session, the world disappears. The day before this event, the world disappeared for 30 hours straight.
Don't do this. I'm writing about it here because the developer culture around sleep is, frankly, embarrassing.
What India Is Actually Bringing to the Table in 2026
Let's start with the part that should not need defending but somehow still does.
India's modern engineering ecosystem is world-class. Concrete examples that I think about when I'm planning architecture:
- Aadhaar-scale identity infrastructure — biometric authentication for over a billion people, sub-second response times, designed from scratch.
- UPI — a real-time, interoperable payments system processing tens of billions of transactions per month. Most "fintech" in the West has not built anything close.
- Open-source contribution at scale — increasingly, the maintainers and architects of major OSS projects are based in India.
- Engineering culture forged under hard constraints — cost, latency, linguistic diversity, scale.
If you are designing systems in 2026 and you are not in conversation with Indian engineering culture, you are quietly leaving capability on the table. This is not charity. This is competitive advantage.
What I Saw on the Pitch Stage
The range was the point. From the night:
- Orbital debris removal — building infrastructure to clean up low Earth orbit before it becomes unusable.
- Reimagined yoga mats — designing one of the most-used objects in the world from first principles, with sustainable materials.
- Cross-border SaaS — built from day one to serve both Indian and Japanese markets, not bolted on as an afterthought.
- Plus teams in healthtech, supply chain transparency, climate-aware materials, and dev tooling.
The thing that made this event different from a typical "international business mixer" was the technical seriousness of the founders. These are not deal-flow tourists. These are people writing code and shipping product across both ecosystems.
What This Means If You're Building Solo
A few practical takeaways for anyone building cross-border products:
1. Design for both India and Japan from day one if you can
Adding multi-region support later is technical debt. Adding multi-cultural product thinking later is architectural debt. The teams I admired most at the event had bilingual UI, currency abstraction, and locale-aware data models from their very first commit.
// Don't do this:
const formatPrice = (price: number) => `¥${price}`;
// Do this:
type Locale = 'ja-JP' | 'en-IN' | 'hi-IN';
const formatPrice = (price: number, locale: Locale, currency: 'JPY' | 'INR') =>
new Intl.NumberFormat(locale, { style: 'currency', currency }).format(price);
It looks trivial. It is not trivial. The first version locks you into a single market mental model.
2. Talk to Indian engineers about constraints you've never had to think about
Cost-per-API-call thinking. Mobile-first under intermittent connectivity. Multi-script rendering. Edge cases in scaling that don't exist when your user base is in San Francisco.
Even if your product never ships to India, this conversation makes you a better engineer.
3. Respect the long arc
The cultural and intellectual exchange between India and Japan is not new. It is at least 30,000 years old, traceable through deep haplogroup connections, the migration of the Saka, and Buddhism arriving in Japan as Shaka. When two civilizations have been in dialogue for that long, "international partnership" stops being a slogan and starts being a continuation.
This is not just romantic. It actually changes how you negotiate, design, and build.
The Embarrassing Part: Solo Developer Health
OK now the part I owe you.
I went to this event after coding for 30 hours straight. I am very lucky that the talks were interesting enough to keep me alert. They could just as easily not have been, and I would have been the guy nodding off in the second row of a high-stakes networking event.
Here is the rule I am committing to publicly so it costs me something to break:
Laptop closes at 22:00 the night before any high-stakes event. No exceptions.
And here is the broader operating doctrine I'm trying to live by as a solo dev:
| Practice | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Yoga (daily, even 15 min) | Resets posture, breath, and nervous system. Reverses the damage of a screen-bound day. |
| Meditation (daily, 15-20 min) | Cache-clear for the mind. Improves the quality of subsequent decisions dramatically. |
| Sleep (7+ hours, non-negotiable) | The body's nightly garbage collector. Skip it and your decision-making LRU cache fills with stale entries. |
| Movement (walk, stretch, lift) | Circulation. Solo coding is a sedentary occupation by default — don't let it stay that way. |
| Intentional rest (scheduled idleness) | Not "scrolling Twitter." Actual nothing. Counterintuitive, essential. |
For a solo dev, these are not lifestyle accessories. They are part of the system architecture. Your body is not a bug you patch at the end of the sprint. It's the runtime.
A Quick Note on Yoga and Meditation, Specifically
I want to address something. In Western dev culture, yoga and meditation often get framed as "wellness lifestyle stuff." That framing makes them easy to dismiss when a deadline looms.
In Japan, in India, and across much of Asia, these practices are not lifestyle. They are foundational technologies for the body and mind, refined over thousands of years. I take them seriously the same way I take version control seriously: because the system doesn't work without them.
If you've been treating them as optional, I'd gently invite you to give them a real two-week trial. Same energy you'd give a new framework you're evaluating.
Closing
The vow I walked away with from Marunouchi:
Learn together. Build together. Hold each other up. Be partners in healing what is broken in the world.
That is the cross-border collaboration brief I want to live by. And the only way I get to participate in it for the next 30 years is by getting better at sleep tonight.
If you're a solo dev, or you're building cross-border between India and Japan (or anywhere, really), drop a comment. What's one practice that has actually stuck for you? I'm collecting data points.
Ko Takahashi — Entrepreneur, Philosopher, Engineer
CEO of Jon & Coo Inc. | Lead Architect of Matsuri Platform | Editor in Chief of The J-Times
Tokyo. ko-takahashi.jp
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