About
Solo, self-hosted, sustainable.
Freedom isn’t a lifestyle. It’s infrastructure. I’m Henry. I run a one-person business from Tokyo, keep daily work running with AI and tools I host myself, and write down what works.
Who I am
I’m Henry, based in Tokyo, running my own one-person company.
Before coming to Japan I worked in the media for many years. Then I started a company, and the project received investment from internationally listed companies.
I work in Chinese and English, and I’m learning Japanese.
What I do
I help small and mid-sized businesses build and deploy private AI models and agents.
AI is the main topic of this site and my main work. What I care about is making AI genuinely useful inside a small company, not just a trial:
- Private AI models: they run inside the company’s own environment, so the data stays in its own hands.
- Agents: repetitive, rule-based work goes to AI, and people handle only what needs judgment.
- Self-hosting and operations: models and tools run on controllable private servers, with predictable costs and easy long-term upkeep.
I apply the same approach to myself: run what I can myself, automate what I can, and keep a one-person operation steady. This site is an example. The articles, the three language versions, short links, comments and feeds all run on a system I built myself.
What you’ll find here
AI is the thread running through every section. The content is split into five sections, and all of it is something I’ve tried myself and learned from.
- Solo Founder: methods and trade-offs of running a one-person business, such as virtual office addresses in Japan, government resources for expanding to Tokyo, and why a solo founder needs a devil’s advocate.
- Digital Life: self-hosting and tinkering notes, including NAS, Docker, Cloudflare Tunnel and tuning local large models.
- Foreign Exposure: procedures and experience of living in Japan, such as updating residence card details, opening a Japan Post Bank account, changing broadband and short-term rentals.
- Flow & Focus: thoughts on AI, attention, energy management and life.
- Lifestyle: language-learning resources and small everyday discoveries.
How I work
I follow four principles when I write, and I use them to decide what is worth doing.
- Run it yourself to know it. For tools that can be self-hosted, I run them myself first, then write about them.
- Verify first, then recommend. I don’t recommend what I haven’t used, and if I used something and didn’t like it, I say so.
- Stay clear-eyed about AI. I use AI heavily, and I also write about its limits: flattery, anxiety, and its effect on creative work.
- Sustainable beats polished. A one-person operation depends on a system that can last, not on a burst of effort.
Contact and notes
To reach me, see the Contact page, where different addresses are listed by purpose. I can’t offer individual advice on personal procedures or specific cases.
If your company wants to explore a private AI or agent setup, write to the “general questions, collaboration” address on the Contact page.
The articles are my personal experience and notes, not legal, tax, financial or medical advice. For anything important, rely on official information. See the Terms of Use.