While I was taking on the warm-up rally in England, there were friends all across Japan spending their own precious time genuinely backing this challenge of mine.

“Live big through your connections with people, not through money” — Fumiaki Nakamura’s Enishi Tsumugi University, spread across the country. I met this place to learn about six years ago, in the second class of the Tokyo campus.

Not long after starting my own company, rather than learning business, I found connections and value far more precious than money can buy.

A collection of Fumiaki Nakamura’s words from Enishi Tsumugi University

It is easy to say things in the world; putting them into action is never simple. But I have felt it for real, alongside the friends I learned these words with, living exactly what Fumiaki Nakamura teaches.

So let me share some of my favourites.

  • “Live big through your connections with people, not through money!”
  • “Think about what it’s for, not what to do.”
    Looking closely at the root of what you feel is how a life deepens.
  • People find reasons they cannot do something, and that is exactly why they cannot. No money, no connections, no experience. List what you lack and it never ends. But the people who make dreams real say “which is exactly why.” Which is exactly why they do what they can, now.

    There is something in front of you that you can do, so do it with everything you have.

That is what she said.
Friends I met and learned alongside carried word of my challenge into places I had never been, and the people who resonated with it passed it on to more people again — and I only learned afterwards how far that circle of support had spread across the country.

In the middle of this challenge, cancer was found in me. But it is precisely because of this challenge that I could genuinely think “even time spent in despair is a waste”, and that is how I have got to today.

Friends who kept carrying that resolve forward on my behalf, instead of worry, are how so many real connections have spread from here.

A friend, carrying flyers about my challenge, has been running all across the country; a friend connected through her, someone I have still never met, told me: “I didn’t want the flyer to just get thrown away, so I made this postcard instead!” and went out to spread the word for me.

“What for” — taking on a challenge

Born with a congenital internal malformation, I have lived facing death from the start. Even after surgery at seventeen and stepping out into the world, my manager called me unfit for society; with no formal education and unable to do what was considered ordinary or common sense, I lived somewhere hard to be, telling myself, along with everyone else, “you can’t do it.”

But meeting the world of motorsport and taking it on, I found hope to live by, and threw myself at it with everything I had — which is how I got to where I am now.

That is exactly why I want, this time, to help remove the walls of denial and giving up in people’s hearts, and move even a little closer to a world where everyone can cheer each other on.

You take nothing with you when you die. The only thing you can carry to the other side is memory.
All that is left behind is the story each person lived.

“I’ll carry what you feel forward myself!” — one friend stood up and said that, and now walks the country visiting Enishi Tsumugi University chapters at her own expense, with no funding behind her at all.

Her words have become a source of strength for me too.

Thank you, truly, for taking on this challenge with me! Because of you I get to take mine on too, and I keep receiving so many thank-yous for it.

I feel that action like this could never come from someone treating it as somebody else’s business. This baton of feeling keeps spreading, and today too a great deal of support has come in because of it.

For me, this Peking to Paris Motor Challenge still has a great many walls left to get past.

But whatever happens, this challenge is giving me the strength to keep going without giving up.

I want to leave my gratitude here, from the very bottom of my heart.

Thank you — to everyone who has met me along the way.

Let’s keep driving this journey of a life together, from here!