Why Ittsui exists.

Before Ittsui, I spent six months wwoofing (volunteering on organic farms) in Yugawara, then in Negoro, in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan. Long, simple days: the soil, the seasons, very little noise. That's where a question started working on me, before I knew what to do with it: in a huge city like Tokyo, surrounded by millions of people, how do you still end up feeling alone?

The journey went on with a backpack, from Berlin to Prague. One evening, arriving late, I found the hostel I had planned to sleep in already closed for the night. I found another one. That's where I met a Japanese traveller, also on her own, and we ended up talking about this still-vague idea for an app.

Her first reaction was to make clear what it wasn't: not a social network, not a place to talk to strangers, something she said she was naturally wary of, especially as a woman. But what she said next changed the direction of the project.

“The problem isn't that we don't want to see people. It's that we don't have the time.”

She described her reality in Tokyo: working days of eight to ten hours, sometimes more, full weeks from Monday to Friday, and a Sunday mostly spent recovering. In practice, only Friday or Saturday evening is left to organise anything with anyone, and you still need the energy for it. According to her, that isn't about to change, not in ten years, not in twenty.

So it isn't a problem of wanting to. It's a problem of load: having to keep suggesting, following up, finding a time, managing the conversation thread that ends up dying for lack of time to answer it. Adding one more app to check wouldn't have solved anything; it would just have added one more thing to carry.

That observation, not a starting idea, is what gave Ittsui its current shape: one proposal, one decision, then nothing left to manage until next time. The silence in between isn't a lack of features. It's the point.

The project is still young, built by one person, and keeps evolving through real conversations with real early users, met in person in Paris. This page exists because several of them asked the same honest question: “what's the context?” Here it is.