The EU and Japan just closed out a two-phase pilot showing that digital identity wallets built on entirely separate governance frameworks can issue, present, and verify each other's credentials. The report confirms both directions worked: a Japanese verifier reading an EU wallet's credential, and an EU verifier reading a Japanese wallet's credential, using OpenID4VP v1 and HAIP v1.0 in phase one, with phase two in February 2026 adding trusted lists and OID4VCI issuance flows to make third-country verification machine-readable rather than dependent on manual, out-of-band trust setup. What makes this notable isn't the demo itself — academic learning credentials are a deliberately low-stakes test case — but the conclusion it supports. As the EU's own writeup puts it, the pilot showed international interoperability can be ensured through existing architectures, even if parties have different governance frameworks. That's a real finding: it means the EUDI Wallet and Japan's My Number Card system don't need to converge on one shared protocol stack to trust each other's outputs. They need aligned technical standards and a mutual recognition agreement, which is a legal problem, not an engineering one. That legal gap is where the pilot's own report puts the remaining friction. Coverage of the report notes the biggest remaining hurdles are not technical but legal, specifically the mutual recognition and trust frameworks that would give a cross-border credential legal standing. Put differently: the crypto works, but nobody's signed off yet on what a foreign-issued credential is worth in a domestic court or benefits office. This sits squarely in the identity pillar NANDA tracks, but it's worth noting the same report explicitly gestures beyond humans. One account of the pilot points out the cross-border ambition parallels standards work already underway on identity and trust for humans and AI agents at the ITU. That's a tell: the same OpenID4VP/trusted-list plumbing being validated for student diplomas is the plumbing candidate architectures for agent identity are quietly building on. If a European agent needs to present a verifiable credential to a Japanese verifier — proving which organization authorized it, under what scope — this pilot is effectively a dry run for that problem, minus the legal recognition layer agents will need even more urgently than students do. The work supports an EU-Japan Memorandum of Cooperation on Digital Identities and Trust Services signed in April 2024, and is one strand of the EU's broader Large Scale Pilots program testing the wallet in real-world conditions as member states roll it out domestically.