When I was young, farming meant fertilizer, and fertilizer meant night soil, cow manure, chicken manure. I assumed vegetables grew out of things like that. To be honest, it left me with the sense that soil was dirty — something I would rather not touch.
Years of natural farming changed that completely. In nature, fallen leaves and dead grass pile up, microorganisms break them down, and soil is made. Soil was clean all along. What was dirty was the picture in my head.
These days I also find myself wondering what the cattle have been eating. What farmers used long ago and what comes out of modern livestock operations no longer seem to me like the same thing. Perhaps this is what it means to make your mind new.
What If Nothing Is Actually New?
We tend to assume the present is newer than the past. Our medicine is more advanced. Our politics are fairer. Our schools teach better than the ones our grandparents attended. The direction of time feels like the direction of progress.
In January 1952, a Japanese writer named Mokichi Okada sat down and disagreed with all of it.
He knew the phrase he was using was worn out. Telling people to renew their thinking is hardly original, he admits at the start. But what he means by it, he says, is a little different from the usual thing.
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 started again on a completely different road.
This particular piece was never published in his lifetime. It reads that way — less polished than his other work, and noticeably more irritated.
New Clothes on an Old Body
Okada’s complaint is not that modern people are behind the times. It is that their newness is a costume.
What passes for new, he writes, is really the act of appearing new — being fashionable about it. Look closely and you find something old wrapped in new cloth.
Medicine, he says, is the obvious case. It is called advanced, and to him it looked ancient. Then he simply lists the rest: farming, politics, economics, education, art, labour. All of it, he says, is so old that mould has grown on it.
He knows how this sounds. You may wonder whether there is something wrong with my head for saying so, he writes. And then he closes the door behind him: the very fact that you think that way is itself the old mind at work.
It is a hard argument to get out of. Disagreeing is treated as proof.
The Example He Chose
For something concrete, he picks democracy — which in Japan in 1952 was still new, installed after the war and only a few years old.
Under the robes of democracy, he says, you can catch glimpses of armour and swords through the sleeve. And the sword, he adds, has a way of cutting into people’s rights.
His second example follows the same pattern. People had begun speaking of equality between men and women. Yet in the homes and streets around him, he saw men who still treated women as beneath them the moment their temper or their money gave them the chance.
The words changed. The behaviour did not.
Barbarians in Civilised Dress
From there he widens the lens to the whole society, and the list is grim: moral decay from top to bottom, corrupt officials, murder, robbery, fraud — hardly a day’s newspaper without them. Strikes everywhere, blackouts, coal shortages, transport at a standstill.
He sums it up in one phrase. What he sees is a gathering of barbarians dressed in the clothes of civilisation.
Where He Thought It All Came From
Okada traces the whole thing to a single cause: the idea that matter is all there is.
That way of thinking is itself old, he argues, but almost nobody notices. So people go on building what he calls a hell of a civilisation, and then gasp for breath inside the thing they built.
You do not have to share his metaphysics to see the shape of the argument. He is saying that a society can update every one of its tools and institutions while leaving the assumption underneath them untouched — and that the assumption is where the real age is.
The Part That Stings
He ends with a warning aimed at a specific group: educated people. They are the ones, he says, who have the hardest time with this, because their old minds cannot make sense of what he is proposing.
Then comes the line the whole piece is built for.
The things you are keeping in your breast pocket because you believe they are fine and valuable — those are exactly the things that will soon be useless, and will have to be thrown away.
Read that slowly and it stops being about 1952. Everybody is carrying something like that: a qualification, a method, a way of doing the job that has always worked. Okada is not asking anyone to throw it out today. He is asking a smaller and more uncomfortable question. Do you actually know which of the things you are carrying is which?
Read the Original
This is a short introduction. The full text — written by Okada in Japanese in 1952 — is available on meshiya.jp.
👉 頭を新しくせよ（meshiya.jp）
