Pathways for women: a Japanese founder reimagines solo travel in Asia

When Julie Taeko sat down to interview Mei Tanaka, a Tokyo-based software developer turned entrepreneur, the conversation quickly moved past product features and into something more personal. Tanaka had spent three years building a mobile application designed to help women travel alone across Asia, and the story of how that project began revealed as much about Japanese workplace culture as it did about the practical challenges of navigating unfamiliar cities.

The app, which Tanaka named Kōro (a word meaning "path" or "route"), has attracted attention from investors in Singapore, users in Sydney, and feature coverage in outlets as far away as Perth. It also reflects a slow but meaningful shift in how Japanese women view entrepreneurship, a topic Julie has explored throughout her research at Kyoto University and in her the hidden potential of Japan's aging female workforce in entrepreneurship. What follows is a condensed version of that interview, woven with reflections on why solo female travel has become a quiet frontier for women-led startups in Asia.

From corporate office to solo traveler

Tanaka's path to founding a travel app began with a layover. In 2019, she was working as a backend engineer at a mid-sized Tokyo firm and took a solo trip to Taiwan during the Golden Week holiday. The experience, she told Julie, was transformative in a way she had not anticipated. Walking through the night markets of Taipei, she realized that her anxiety about traveling alone had less to do with the destination and more to do with the absence of a reliable safety net in her pocket.

That realization planted a seed. Back in Tokyo, Tanaka began sketching an interface that would aggregate verified hostels, women-only taxi services, and local emergency contacts into a single dashboard. She spent her evenings prototyping the design while still commuting to her office in Shinjuku, a schedule she describes as a kind of slow rebellion against the idea that women over thirty should be planning weddings rather than building software.

Her decision to leave corporate Japan was not made lightly. Tanaka pointed to the same generational pressures documented in Julie's research on Japanese women in midlife: a lingering expectation that female employees prioritize family over career ambitions, combined with a venture capital ecosystem that often overlooks founders outside the major hubs of Tokyo and Osaka. Yet she found that her product idea resonated with users the moment she shared wireframes in online communities, many of them based in places like Melbourne and Brisbane where interest in East Asian travel has grown steadily.

Designing with empathy at the core

The Kōro app distinguishes itself from generic travel platforms through several features tailored specifically for women moving alone through unfamiliar cities. Users can share their live itinerary with trusted contacts, request verified female drivers through partner agencies, and access a community-driven review system for accommodations that goes beyond cleanliness to address lighting, neighborhood safety, and proximity to late-night transport.

Tanaka emphasized that these features emerged from interviews with hundreds of women across Asia. In cities like Bangkok and Seoul, she found that solo travelers wanted different things. Bangkok users prioritized verified transport and 24-hour support lines, while respondents in Seoul asked for detailed information about subway exits and walking routes. The app's interface adapts accordingly, offering city-specific safety overlays that highlight well-lit streets, women-only train carriages, and culturally appropriate clothing guidance.

The design process itself has been shaped by Tanaka's experience as a woman working in Japanese tech. She noted that her engineering team includes several women who transitioned from non-technical careers later in life, and she credits that perspective with pushing the product toward accessibility. Voice navigation works in five languages, the font size scales for older eyes, and the emergency button triggers both a local hotline and an alert to a designated contact in the user's home country, whether that home is in Sydney's Inner West or a regional town in Queensland.

Crossing cultural borders as a business

Expanding beyond Japan has not been straightforward. Tanaka described early conversations with potential partners in South Korea and Indonesia as both exciting and exhausting. In South Korea, her team navigated a market saturated with established travel apps, requiring them to position Kōro as a specialized safety companion rather than a general booking tool. In Indonesia, particularly in Jakarta and Bali, regulatory requirements around data storage and emergency services added months of compliance work.

The Australian market presented its own dynamics. Australian consumers, accustomed to strong protections from bodies like the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, tend to scrutinize privacy policies closely. Tanaka's team invested significant time rewriting their data handling disclosures to align with the Privacy Act 1988 and to clearly explain how location data is stored, encrypted, and deleted. This diligence, while time-consuming, ultimately became a marketing advantage in regions where digital trust is increasingly fragile.

Australia also offered an unexpected pipeline of early adopters. Many young Australians use a Working Holiday visa to spend time in Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia, and they arrive with a practical mindset shaped by their own country's outdoor and road-trip culture. Tanaka noted that feedback from users in Adelaide and Perth helped refine the app's offline maps, since reliable mobile data is not guaranteed on longer overland trips across Indonesia and Malaysia.

Why women-led travel startups matter

For Julie, the interview with Tanaka fits into a broader research question about who gets to build the infrastructure of modern travel. The tourism industry has long been shaped by male executives at global hotel chains and airline conglomerates, while the lived experience of moving through the world alone has remained a niche concern. When women founders step into that gap, the products tend to reflect a different set of priorities.

This is particularly visible in Japan, where the conversation about women's economic participation has shifted markedly over the past decade. Tanaka herself referenced government initiatives like the Womenomics framework and the growing visibility of female founders in Japanese media as factors that made her leap feel less unusual than it might have a decade earlier. Yet she also acknowledged persistent gaps. Venture funding for women in Japan remains a fraction of total startup investment, and many female founders still face questions about commitment and family plans that male peers rarely encounter.

The broader cultural implications extend beyond business. Solo female travel, once framed as reckless or improper in many parts of Asia, is now a measurable market segment. Surveys by tourism boards in Taiwan and Thailand have begun to track female solo arrivals separately, and apps like Kōro sit at the intersection of that data and the practical needs it reveals.

Comparing the app to mainstream platforms

During the interview, Tanaka shared practical advice that she wished someone had given her before her first solo trip. Some of it is specific to the app, but much of it applies to anyone with a smartphone and a sense of curiosity. The overview below highlights how Kōro approaches the needs of women traveling alone relative to two established travel platforms.

Feature Kōro General travel app A General travel app B
Women-only verified transport Yes, in 12 cities No No
Live itinerary sharing with designated contact Yes, with automatic check-in prompts Basic share-location Not available
City-specific safety overlays Yes, updated monthly Limited Not available
Multilingual emergency hotline Yes, 24/7 in 8 languages English only English and Mandarin
Offline maps with women's route suggestions Yes Standard offline maps Standard offline maps
Verified accommodation reviews focused on safety Yes Mixed reviews Mixed reviews

This snapshot makes clear that Kōro's competitive advantage lies in specialization rather than scale. General platforms offer breadth, but they rarely dig into the granular details that matter when a woman is deciding whether to walk a particular street at night or which train carriage to board in a city like Mumbai or Manila.

Habits that make solo travel safer

Solo travel rewards preparation, and a few habits make the difference between a stressful trip and a genuinely restorative one. The following suggestions come up repeatedly in Tanaka's user research and align with the kind of low-key readiness Australians often apply to domestic adventures.

Before you leave home

On the road

For aspiring founders listening from cafés in Surry Hills or co-working spaces in Collingwood, the lesson Tanaka returns to is straightforward: build the thing you wish had existed for you. The market is larger than it looks, the users are eager, and the gap between fear and freedom is often just one reliable app that does the quiet work of turning a stranger's city into somewhere a woman can walk alone.