Yokoi Kenji is a Colombian-Japanese speaker, since 2010 he has given numerous conferences in Colombia, Japan, Brazil, the United States and other countries; based on his two cultures (Colombian and Japanese) he is dedicated to transmitting messages that help people to live better, teaching them to break down the myths that block them.
Yokoi was born in Colombia and when he was ten years old he moved to Japan with his family where he lived until he was twenty-four years old, during these years he learned a lot about Japanese culture regarding order and cleanliness and today we will share four lessons he learned from these two cultures in terms of cleanliness and prosperity.
Contents
Cleanliness represents the heart of people
For the Japanese cleanliness is a very important part of its culture, for example, they believe that the cleanliness of the bathroom (toilette service) represents the heart of the person that used it; when a Japanese enters a bathroom and realizes the state of the bathroom, he immediately thinks that this is the heart of the family living in that house. A public bathroom should always be clean, and the person who uses it should leave the toilet clean since the next person to use it maybe is a child. For the Japanese culture if a person leaves a public bathroom dirty it is because he has some kind of internal problem or does not have a good heart.
Cleanliness is everyone’s responsibility
When Yoko arrives in Japan, he realizes that his school does not have a cleaning staff, so all the children have to take out their rags and help clean the classroom floor every day, the hallway floor or the part of the school that corresponds to each grade once a week, and once a year, students and representatives clean every corner of the school.
Cleanliness and its connection to prosperity
The habits that Yokoi acquired when he arrived in Japan lead him to see a great connection between cleanliness and a person’s prosperity, and this is one of the main tips that he gives to young people that want to be prosperous, “wash the dishes”. Anxiety to see miracles makes people lazy and for this reason, we are not able to see the connection, we don’t manage to see that everything is about work and effort. Knowing other cultures teaches us that what we think to be normal is not really normal; we need to learn to wash the dishes we use without being told, to learn to move, to wake up. A person who learns to wash the dishes, to be cleaning his work area, to be cleaning, to be accustomed to take out the clothes he does not wear, to be detailing the cleaning in each place, a person like that has the tendency to know how to face his mistakes, his failures, to know to say “yes I did it, I’m going to clean it up” not avoid it. That’s what this is about, the culture of cleanliness is the culture of knowing that every day trash comes out from a house, that every day we do negative things and that’s why it’s about identifying our mistakes and cleaning them up, we have to understand that if we get dirty or muddy, someone is going to have to clean us up or “throw us away” (throw away the dirtiness is in us).
We must evolve
A healthy culture can also become a harmful culture, which is one that does not change, that keeps us in a cycle and does not allow us to evolve. Yokoi mentions that even in our failures, we must evolve, that we must seek out to see changes, that we must err, make mistakes and experiment. As we explained in our previous article entitled 5 Dan Lok rules for success, which will allow us to succeed is going to explore and be willing to know new things, but without getting on the “blacklist”, those who get on this list are those who have made a mistake so many times that they are simply not able to stop and have no interest in improving.
What do you think about this topic? Would you like to know other lessons from Yokoi Kenji?
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Image of qimono via Pixabay.com under Creative Commons license.
