The Five Stages of Wealth (2021 version)
What is abundance?
According to Hideo Itokawa, a Japanese rocket development pioneer who also became famous for the asteroid Itokawa, there are currently three rooms on Earth, each with a different level of wealth
First Room
The first room is the bare necessities of life...something to eat, something to wear, and a place to live to protect from the rain and dew. In order to obtain this bare minimum of abundance, one must work hard from scratch, and first satisfy the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter in order to survive. In modern times, this is the kind of abundance that can only be truly felt at disaster evacuation sites
Second Room
The second room is where we can live without things, but we seek out things that are convenient and enjoyable to have, and feel that these things represent a sense of wealth. These are so-called luxury items, and ownership of things like cars and audio equipment became symbols of wealth, as was the case for young people in Japan during the period of rapid economic growth. In today's developed countries, we have already entered an era of "sharing," and even in Japan, young people are no longer as motivated to pursue this kind of wealth
Third Room
The third room is a more modern one, a room of affluence, where we seek stimulation in the brain's pleasure center. More and more people are becoming addicted to gambling through smartphone apps, adult videos, pachinko, and other forms of gambling, and before we know it, these have become major industries. This room is where people feel that using dangerous drugs, which are a global problem, is a source of affluence. Presidents in the United States and the Philippines have made overcoming drug addiction a top priority. This also includes finance, which utilizes computers to manipulate huge numbers that cannot be seen in reality. Curiously, the world's wealthiest companies, such as GAFA, have sold smartphones, tablet computers, and associated software—the source of their wealth—all over the world, but they try to prevent their children from using them as much as possible, citing their harmful effects
Currently, civil wars are occurring all over the world as a result of political poverty, and developing countries with large numbers of refugees are in the first room of abundance, while developing countries are striving for abundance in the second room.Furthermore, developed countries such as Japan, Europe, and the United States, where smartphones are widespread, have completely settled in the third room
The third room is a very dangerous room, because the abundance of this room is limitless, according to the way the brain works, and its desires are virtual, self-centered, and limitless, and there is a danger that it will take root and live there forever
Can we really escape from this third room?
What we need now is the spirit of a "traveler" who takes a courageous step into a new world, as advocated by CERARICA
The fourth room (discovered in the 1980s)
Let me introduce you to the fourth room we are referring to
The fourth room is dedicated to valuing relationships between people. While traveling around the world in search of CERARICA ingredients, I noticed a unique strength of the Japanese people. This is the Japanese sensibility that "seeing the joy on the other person's face is my own joy," and before you know it, the happiness of others becomes your own happiness. In other words, this room embodies the warmth and abundance that arises between people by realizing "altruistic" joy
CERARICA NODA is working to develop a bioindustry in the impoverished regions of inland China, using the idea of planting trees and utilizing insects, because by improving the environment and economy in these impoverished areas, we who help them can also achieve both spiritual and material prosperity through the genuine joy on the faces of the villagers who live there.Even in areas where drugs are grown, we are trying to develop a "biological industry" using bio-wax that can truly enrich people all over the world and make them more beautiful
Once the fourth room is opened, you will notice that there is a fifth room beyond it
The fifth room (discovered in the 1990s)
It is a room that allows for dialogue not only between humans, but between humans and all living things on Earth
Humans have words to communicate with each other, but how do so many living things communicate with each other? To do this, we must first listen to the voices of living things. This requires the sensibility of the Japanese, who are able to create many small poems from the insects of summer and autumn. The reason this Earth has remained so beautiful is that, as James Lovelock's "Gaia hypothesis" suggests, living things communicate with each other in various ways, maintaining harmony as a single living organism
When we leave the hustle and bustle of the city and find ourselves in a deep forest, we are sure to feel something profound when we hear the chirps of birds, the songs of insects, the gentle sunlight filtering through the trees, and the rustling of leaves in the wind. The fifth room is a world where not only communication between humans but also the language of living things is understood, enabling information exchange between living things, and where people, plants, insects, and other living things on Earth can converse and coexist in true abundance. This room
makes us realize that true abundance comes when all of Earth's creatures can communicate with each other in harmony through the "coexistence of people, forests, and life."
Just as semiconductors have dramatically advanced human communication, dolphins and whales have CERARICA , or life wax, in their heads, which they use to locate themselves and communicate with others using high-frequency waves. Some species of bees also produce CERARICA , a life wax on their body surface, which acts as a language, and they can quickly identify each other by touching each other with their antennae. If we can unravel this mechanism, rich, mutual communication between humans and other living things will no longer be a dream
We believe that realizing C&C (CERA RICA & COMMUNICATION), listening to what animals, insects and plants are saying, overcoming excessive anthropocentrism, and leading the entire life system in a direction that makes the Earth more abundant and beautiful...
this is the true nature of "coexistence between people, forests and life."