Ask almost anyone how far they should walk in a day and you will get the same answer. Ten thousand steps.

It is on our wrists and in our pockets. It is the goal that fitness trackers have set us for years. It is the closest thing fitness has to a universal law, and hardly anybody knows where it came from.

The answer is a Japanese clock company.

A number with a good name

In 1964 Tokyo hosted the Olympic Games, and Japan found itself thinking about how little ordinary people were moving. The following year a company called Yamasa Tokei Keiki released a small device to clip to your waist. It was the first pedometer made for the public.

They called it the Manpo-kei. The name means ten-thousand step-meter.

The figure didn’t come from a study. It came from the name. Ten thousand was round, memorable and sounded like an achievement. It helped that the Japanese character for 10,000 looks a little like a person walking.

“It was a made-up number in the sense that 10,000 sounds good, it’s easy to remember,” the Harvard epidemiologist I-Min Lee told Popular Science.

So for sixty years, millions of us have been chasing a target that began as a piece of branding.

Why it lasted

That isn’t the scandal it sounds like. The number lasted because it was a very good idea in a very good shape.

Before it, walking more was a vague intention. After it, walking was something you could count. You could have a good day and a bad day. You could be 800 short at nine in the evening and go round the block to finish. It turned a habit into a game, and people have always liked a game.

It turned a habit into a game, and people have always liked a game.

When researchers did come to study it, they found the exact figure mattered less than anyone assumed. “You start to see pretty profound benefits much sooner than 10,000 steps,” Philip Clare, a biostatistician at the University of Sydney, told the same magazine.

The number was never really the point. Getting us out of the door was.

Walking has its moment

Which brings us to now, because walking is suddenly fashionable.

The fastest-rising fitness search of the past year wasn’t a new class or a piece of equipment. It was a way of walking, alternating a few minutes fast with a few minutes slow, that has become known as Japanese walking. People are holding meetings on foot. They are going on walking dates and joining walking clubs. Friends who used to talk about the gym now talk about their route.

It isn’t hard to see why. Walking is free. It needs no kit, no booking and no skill. You can do it alone with your thoughts or alongside someone you want to talk to, and it is one of the few forms of exercise that leaves you free to notice where you are.

Sixty years ago a clock company needed a catchy name for a gadget. It gave the world a number, and the number gave us a reason to go for a walk.

The target was invented. The walk was always real.