Natural farming means long stretches of working alone. The mornings are early, the insects bite, and the heat and cold both take their toll. I don’t dislike it, but I won’t pretend it’s never hard.
Things changed, though, when visitors came to the farm where I worked and I showed them around. “This has changed how I think about fertilizer,” someone would say. Others would taste a freshly picked vegetable and tell me they had never eaten anything so good — that they wanted to try growing it themselves.
Every time, I felt my own happiness grow along with theirs. You cannot become happy yourself without making others happy. I don’t think I would ever have felt the truth of Okada’s words if I had only ever worked alone.
No One Is Happier Than I Am
That is an odd thing to say out loud. Most of us wouldn’t. Even if we felt it, we would soften it first.
In January 1950, a Japanese writer named Mokichi Okada wrote it plainly. There is probably no one happier than I am right now, he said — and he added that he thought about it often, and was grateful for it.
He had written about himself once before, he explains, but from the outside: how he appeared, viewed as an object. This time he wanted to do the reverse and describe what it was actually like on the inside, exactly as it was.
Who Was Mokichi Okada?
Mokichi Okada (1882–1955) is known today for a farming method that uses no fertilizer at all, and for a large body of writing on health, art, and how people ought to live. Before any of that he was a merchant. He built a business, made money, lost nearly all of it when the economy collapsed, and began again on a completely different road.
By 1950 he was in his late sixties and leading a religious movement. He says as much at the start of this piece, and he is careful about it: he knew his own position was unusual, and he did not want the reader to think happiness of this kind was reserved for people in unusual positions. There is a way into it, he says, that any ordinary person can use. Then he does something unusual for a writer in his position — instead of explaining the method, he describes his own temperament and lets the reader work backward from it.
The First Thing He Checked in the Morning
He gets up, and before anything else he wants to know how everyone in the house is doing. If even one person is out of sorts, his own day feels wrong.
Then he points out how backwards this is. In a Japanese household of that era, the flow ran the other way. The family checked the head of the house’s mood first, and the day was arranged around it. Okada was the head of the house — and he was the one doing the checking. He calls it strange. He even admits that a part of him finds it a little regrettable in himself, as though he ought to be the other way around.
It is a small detail and easy to read past. But it shows where his attention went by default: outward first, inward second.
Making People Happy Was His Hobby
Ever since he was young, he writes, he had liked making people happy. He describes it as having become almost a pastime — the Japanese word he uses is closer to an indulgence, the thing a person does purely because they enjoy it, the way someone else might collect things or fish.
That framing matters. He is not describing a duty he took on. He is describing something he did for fun. And he says his mind was always working on the same question in the background: what would it take for everyone to be happy?
What He Could Not Stand
The reverse side of this comes out in what he found unbearable.
Angry voices and abuse. Complaints and grumbling and tears. And — this one is oddly human — being told the same thing over and over again.
He sums up his own nature in one line: thoroughly peaceable, oriented toward happiness, and disliking anything he had to cling to.
It is worth noticing that he presents all of this as temperament, not as achievement. He is not claiming he trained himself into being this way. He is reporting what he found when he looked honestly at himself.
The Sentence the Whole Piece Rests On
All of it leads to one line, which he says he repeats constantly:
You cannot become happy yourself unless you make other people happy.
Read quickly, that sounds like an instruction to be selfless. It isn’t quite. He is not telling anyone to give up their own happiness for someone else’s. He is reporting a piece of cause and effect he observed in his own life: his happiness went up when the happiness around him went up, and there was no separate route to it.
Self-interest is not removed from this. It is turned around and pointed somewhere else.
His Largest Goal Was the Same Thing, Made Bigger
Okada’s stated aim was what he called paradise on earth. Coming from a religious founder, that phrase can sound enormous and far away.
But he defines it here in the smallest possible terms. Paradise on earth, he says, is this state of mind of mine, shared by others and spread wider. Nothing added. The same movement of attention — how is everyone else doing — simply multiplied.
And Then He Apologizes
The piece ends with a small, honest note. This is a bit self-congratulatory to write, he says, and it makes him uncomfortable. He hopes it is of some use anyway.
That awkwardness is probably the most convincing thing in it. A man setting out to praise himself does not usually stop to say he feels bad about it.
The Test Is Available Tomorrow Morning
You do not need Okada’s sense of mission to try what he is describing. The essay hands you a very small experiment, and it comes around again every day.
When you wake up tomorrow, notice whose mood you check first.
Read the Original
This is a short introduction. The full text — written by Okada in Japanese in 1950 — is available on meshiya.jp.
👉 私というもの（meshiya.jp）
