Why Executives Walk Kumano: What CEOs Are Really Searching For

In conversation after conversation with international executives visiting Kyoto, a pattern emerges. They ask about the Kumano Kodo.

Not hesitantly. Not as a casual tourist inquiry. With a particular intensity — the way people ask about something they have been thinking about for a while, something that feels important but they cannot quite articulate why.

What they are actually asking

On the surface, the Kumano Kodo is a network of ancient pilgrimage trails in the Kii Peninsula south of Osaka, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Emperors walked it. Monks walked it. For over a thousand years, people have walked it for reasons that go beyond the scenery.

But when an American technology executive or a European fund manager asks about it, they are not asking about history. They are asking about something they glimpsed in an article or a conversation — a particular quality of experience that the word pilgrimage seems to point toward, even if the religious framing does not resonate.

What they are describing, when pressed, is a hunger for extended time in which movement, landscape, and silence combine to produce a quality of thought that their ordinary lives — with their scheduled calls and notification streams — do not permit.

The Santiago connection

There is a fact about Kumano that is almost entirely unknown in Japan but that resonates immediately with Western executives: the Kumano Kodo is a sister pilgrimage to the Camino de Santiago.

In 2014, UNESCO recognized both as World Heritage routes and formalized their sister relationship. The Camino — the most famous pilgrimage trail in the Western world — shares a formal cultural bond with Japan’s ancient mountain trails.

For an executive who has walked the Camino, or who has friends who have, this connection is not trivial. It locates the Kumano Kodo within a category of experience they already understand to be valuable: not tourism, not adventure travel, but something closer to enforced reflection at a scale that brief retreats cannot replicate.

What walking does that sitting cannot

The contemplative traditions of Japan have long understood something that neuroscience is now confirming: sustained walking — particularly through natural environments with minimal external stimulation — activates a cognitive mode distinct from both focused task-work and passive rest.

The default mode network, active during undirected thought, is the brain’s mechanism for integration: connecting disparate experiences, surfacing patterns not visible under the pressure of immediate demands, generating the kind of insight that does not arrive on command.

Pilgrimage trails were not designed to be scenic. They were designed to be long enough — days, not hours — that this integrative process could complete itself.

The executive who returns

The executives who ask about Kumano are not looking for a retreat. They are looking for a particular quality of inner work that they have glimpsed before — in a long flight without wifi, in an early morning run before the day starts, in an unexpected moment of clarity between meetings.

They have enough experience to know that the conditions for clear thinking are not the conditions of the working day. And they have enough success to suspect that the next level of performance — in judgment, in strategic perception, in the quality of decisions made under uncertainty — comes from somewhere other than more information or more efficiency.

What Kumano offers — what Japan’s contemplative geography has been offering for over a millennium — is the space in which that somewhere can be found.

Some questions only become answerable when you have been walking long enough.