True wealth is not what you have but what you get rid of

Japan Today

12-05-2025

By Michael Hoffman
Come, let us clean up our lives.
Let us be as dandelion fluff, floating free and unencumbered. An unexpected invitation from an unexpected source – the business magazine President (May 16), whose core readership is precisely the possessing class, ambitious and upwardly mobile, who work to succeed, succeed to rise higher, rise higher – not as dandelion fluff! – to possess more, and so on and so on, no end in view.
Yes, but… there comes a moment in life – in many lives – at the height of success it may be, or in the depths of failure, or somewhere in between – where the futility of it all stands starkly revealed to us and we say to ourselves, 'What's it all for? What do I need with all this stuff I own, these profits I've earned, these honors I've won? Away with it all! Is there a trash box big enough for this rubbish I've pursued all my life, thinking it treasure?'
For Yoshihisa Nakano, who at 80 looks back on a career more varied than most – founder, manager and/ or CEO of various enterprises in Japan and abroad – the notion that true wealth is not what you have but what you get rid of was planted early, germinated slowly and blossomed late. He was 70 when it attained its full flowering and he understood what is really meant by the good life: 'I am as free as dandelion fluff!' Let the wind carry him where it will.
He was born in wartime. His earliest memories are of the charred ruins of firebombed Tokyo, his house among them. He grew up with a grandmother, her character severe, her outlook traditional. She made him learn tea ceremony and flower arranging. 'Like a girl!' the kids teased him. It was good training in being different. Another lesson was soon to follow. His grandmother died and at age 12 the family moved to Hirosaki in Aomori Prefecture. The local dialect was incomprehensible to him. He was a marked boy, his speech betrayed him. He kept silent at first, then broke his silence. Let them mock. He mastered a good answer to mockery: laughter. His laughing photo in President shows us laughter undimmed by age.
He grew up, went to college, was more interested in baseball than in his courses but graduated somehow and was hired by Isetan, the department store. Almost the first thing he did in his new office was remove his necktie. It bound him, stifled him. His boss remonstrated. 'It's manners,' said the boss, 'it's courtesy, it shows respect for clients.' He'd show his respect some other way, he said. No, you won't, came the reply. He was the sort of employee, in short, who makes a nuisance of himself until finally he gets sent down to a subsidiary, there to languish until he either repents or quits.
Nakano quit.
He drifted here, drifted there – dandelion fluff in embryo – until finally he decided on a bold step. He'd leave Japan and seek his fortune in Singapore. Why Singapore? He didn't know himself. It's where his impulse led him.
But fate led him elsewhere. During a stopover in Taipei he left the airport and, wandering around, chanced upon a public lecture on business management. He dropped in, met the lecturer – and changed course. 'Not Singapore. Here.'
The lecturer evidently saw something in him. He smoothed his path to employment with a major fashion outfit, and from the on it was one thing after another, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle raining down from the sky and landing as a fully formed picture, or letters of the alphabet arranging themselves into a novel. 'My life in a word?' he writes – 'random. I never made a plan, never set out to accomplish this or that.' Happening to meet people who happened to open this or that path which happened to be just the thing at just the moment, he made his way, up and up. 'I,' he says, 'possess a very rare gift – the gift of luck.'
A gift indeed – and rare indeed, so rare one wonders: is he qualified to speak for the less fortunate masses, who must struggle to live and can scarcely afford the luxury of freeing themselves of everything that binds them to the conventional, work-a-day, acquisitive life, boring maybe, unfulfilling very likely, the sort of life you look back on as it nears its end saying to yourself, 'I haven't lived!'
Nakano looks back and says, 'What other people see as my successes in life I came to see as my failures.' His enlightenment was long in coming; he was 70 before he faced the full implications of the thoughts germinating within him, giving almost all he owned to charity, to NPOs and the like supporting education in poor countries – had he not grown up poor himself? He'd in fact been a donor all his life, but a half-hearted one, he now decided, judging himself harshly. Calculating his own financial needs he concluded he could live quite comfortably on 500,000 yen a month, 200,000 going to a housekeeper whose help around the house he finds indispensable at his age.
Speaking of the less fortunate masses – representing them in President's package is a young YouTuber calling himself 'Minimalist Takeru.' No preternaturally lucky life can he boast. Quite the contrary: his path to 140,000 followers of his Youtube channel on the minimalist life was rather a rocky one, pocked with all the pitfalls – perhaps not quite all – of 21st-century Japanese life as the century heads into its second quarter.
What, we must first ask, is minimalism? Is it poverty by another name? Emphatically no, says minimalist Takeru. Far from it: it's wealth, true wealth. As a minimalist you'll have everything you need, only you'll need less – and want nothing you don't need, a discipline not easily acquired perhaps but, once acquired, easily pursued. You have less money but more time, and time that is not money is freedom. Freedom – the ultimate wealth!
In his former, pre-minimalist life Takeru worked long, long hours, suffered stress to the point of ulcers and worse, soothed his stress with binge shopping, lived amid clutter that stifled, choked and stressed him into nervous collapse, which forced him out of work and just about to the brink, he writes, of applying in desperation for social welfare – when, browsing in a bookshop, he happened upon a book titled 'Minimalism.' He bought it on impulse, more or less forgot it, recovered his health sufficiently to return to work, broke down again and – remembered the book.
Yes, yes, he said to himself. He looked about him; suddenly all the things filling his modest living space were like strangers forcing themselves on his hospitality – out with them! Trashing is in a sense like its opposite, acquiring – once begun it takes on a life of its own. Before he knew it he was living a minimalist life in a minimalist space, breathing minimalist air, a treasure in itself after years of suffocating in clutter.
Eight years passed. He's married now, and he and his wife have a year-old son. They live in the Kanto countryside, paying little rent and living comfortably, he says, on 200,000 yen month. We're not told their combined income; we infer his YouTubing accounts for most of it, supplemented by lecturing, for he does that too, owing to his and his theme's appeal; plus of course whatever his wife earns.
Minimalism is wonderful, certainly – beautiful in art, fulfilling in life. Is it sustainable? One hesitates to close this story on a note of doubt; but one would hesitate no less not to. The couple's child is now an infant. Infants live cheaply. Older children don't, still less teenagers. As they grow they eat more, wear more and want more. They are not, in other words, minimalist. The biggest child-rearing expense of all is education. Today's tech-heavy education is not cheap. Public junior and senior high schooling is relatively inexpensive, but most parents able to afford it prefer private schools for their supposed quality and links to the best (and most expensive) universities – often abroad, foreign study now considered an almost necessary item in any full curriculum vitae. Will minimalist Takeru say to his son 15 years from now, 'We're minimalists, son, we don't go in for that sort of thing!' Or supposing the boy has a special talent that needs developing? 'Forget it, we can't afford a piano, let alone piano lessons, use your fingers instead to grow vegetables in our garden!'
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