What "The Island That Has Nothing, Yet Is Rich" Taught Me About Living With Enough

Katsuhiko Sakiyama's The Island That Has Nothing, Yet Is Rich is the book behind this personal record of what I've actually started doing, having retired myself at 65 and now splitting my time between Japan and the UK. It's a first-hand account of leaving a director's post at a major publishing house at 52, buying a tiny island called Caohagan off Cebu in the Philippines with his severance pay, and moving there to live alongside the islanders without electricity or running water. When it was published in 1995, the phrase "slow living" wasn't even in common use yet, and the book still sold over 200,000 copies — which tells me a great many people were already feeling the same suffocation he was writing his way out of. This book left me thinking hard about what to let go of, and what to keep.

Recounting "richness" through the senses, not the wallet

The islanders Sakiyama lives among don't measure wealth in money. The sea's bounty, the wind, time spent with neighbours — these are the wealth itself. Reading this, I realised I'd been quietly measuring my own "richness" by a brokerage balance without noticing.

Now, instead of opening an investment app first thing in the morning, I go to the greenhouse to check on the tomatoes and give Meg a stroke before starting the day. I try to register the day's richness through the senses before I ever look at a number. It's a small thing, but it seems to soften how much the numbers affect my mood afterwards. I've also started a small habit of writing down, in a notebook before bed, one thing from the day that money couldn't have bought. If I find myself struggling to think of one, that's usually a sign the day wasn't such a bad one after all.

Only taking what you'll eat today

The book describes fishing on the island as taking only what's needed, then sharing whatever's left. No stockpiling, no hoarding. It struck me as a way of thinking that applies just as well to managing money in retirement.

I used to check my portfolio and almost automatically ask, "can this grow more?" Lately I try to ask a different question first: "is what I have already enough for the life I'm living?" I'm not against growth as a goal, but simply reordering the question — enough, before more — has changed how money-related worry actually lands on me. During my working years, "working" and "earning" were more or less the same thing. Writing this blog now is, in its own way, work too — just not work done for payment. I feel myself gradually shifting weight from work that earns to work that's shared.

Borrowing "here and now" from a life without electricity

Without electricity or running water, the island's day follows the sun. What comes through in Sakiyama's writing isn't a life driven by schedules, but one where the body simply meets the present moment.

I no longer need to race against a schedule now that I'm retired, but my hand still drifts toward my phone out of habit. So I've started leaving my phone indoors during morning and evening greenhouse time. It's only thirty minutes or so, but I notice the changing light and wind far more than I used to. Birdsong in the garden in England, the smell of the season in the garden in Japan — they're different in each place. Reading this book reminded me that living between two bases is, in its own way, a mechanism that keeps pulling me back into the here and now.

Not carrying yesterday's friction into today

On a small island, you can't easily avoid someone you don't get along with. The book is honest about friction between residents, and about misunderstandings between Sakiyama and the islanders themselves — but none of it is written as if a single clash permanently breaks a relationship.

Having to face someone I'd rather not, even at 66, hasn't gone away. What I try to do now is tell myself, before such a meeting, "whatever happens today ends today." I don't try to perform warmth I don't feel, but simply not carrying yesterday's emotion into the room seems to take some of the tension out of it before I even arrive. Afterwards, too, I try not to carry what I felt into whatever comes next — a short walk usually helps close the loop before I move on. Just as there's no real way to escape a small island, there's no real way to escape people entirely either. That's exactly why a small habit of drawing a line under the day matters.

Treating illness and typhoons as weather to be endured

The island has limited medical facilities, and typhoons arrive on a regular schedule. Even so, Sakiyama's writing reads less like fighting an enemy and more like waiting out weather that will eventually pass.

I've noticed more joint stiffness and more broken nights lately, and there are days my body simply doesn't cooperate the way it used to. Drawing on what I learned years ago in Oriental medicine, on stiff mornings I try not to fight it so much as acknowledge it — "today is one of those days" — and settle for acupressure or gentle stretching rather than forcing anything. When I wake in the night, too, I try not to panic about getting back to sleep; I just breathe quietly and count for a while until my body settles. It's not so different, I think, from waiting out a typhoon. Not treating ageing as an enemy is easier said than done, but the islanders' relationship with their typhoons has become one small model for me.

Living as part of nature, and returning to it

Throughout the book, Sakiyama returns again and again to the sense that the sky, the sea, and the land belong to no one. Nature isn't something to own, but something that circulates.

That's pushed me to be more deliberate about composting in the garden. Dead leaves and vegetable scraps return to the soil and become the strength behind next season's crop. Handling that cycle with my own hands leaves me with the quiet sense that I, too, am part of something that will eventually circulate back. It takes months for compost to finish, and watching the cucumbers, aubergines, and tomatoes fruit and wither in their turn during that time makes me feel that the beginning and end of a living thing sit closer together than I usually assume. I can't answer where life comes from or where it goes, but simply feeling "I'm somewhere in the middle of the cycle" seems to soften my irritation at growing older, at least a little.

The other kind of richness that was there all along

"Having nothing" surely wasn't, in practice, a life of complete sufficiency for Sakiyama either — the book doesn't hide the hard realities. But what it left me with is this: richness isn't a quantity you hold, it's an attitude — knowing what's enough, sharing it, and meeting the present moment as it comes. Rather than telling myself to give up the richness that numbers can measure, I've started looking again at the richness that numbers can't. Living between two countries with such different shapes of richness, Japan and the UK, that difference itself is a daily reminder that there's never just one measure of a rich life. At 66, that's a small practice I can begin today.

The book I mentioned here:

Katsuhiko Sakiyama, The Island That Has Nothing, Yet Is Rich (Japanese edition, Shincho Bunko)

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About the author, and the era he wrote from

Katsuhiko Sakiyama was born in 1935. After graduating from Keio University in 1959, he joined Kodansha, later studied in the United States, and then moved to the newly founded Kodansha International, eventually becoming a company director. Kodansha International's mission was, in part, to introduce Japanese culture and literature to the English-speaking world — so from early in his career, Sakiyama was already doing the work of bridging Japan and the world outside it. He spent the years of Japan's rapid postwar growth and subsequent bubble economy — an era in which devoting oneself entirely to one's company was simply assumed — at the centre of the publishing world.

He left the company at 52 and bought Caohagan Island, off Cebu in the Philippines, with his severance pay around 1987. He initially continued running a foreign-affiliated publishing company while commuting to the island, before relocating there fully in 1991. Behind his decision to set aside a career built inside an organisation for a life without electricity or running water, I sense a shift in values — away from possessions and titles, and toward nature and human connection as the true measure of richness.

Published by Shinchosha in 1995, the book sold over 200,000 copies across its hardcover and paperback editions, becoming a bestseller. At a time before "slow living" was a familiar phrase in Japan, his unforced account of leaving corporate life for a life closer to nature clearly resonated with readers who felt the same suffocation in a company-centred way of life. Japan at the time was also just beginning to feel the closed-in mood that followed the bursting of the bubble economy, and I imagine his sheer decision to buy an island and move there read, to many salaried readers, as a genuine glimmer of hope. Sakiyama went on to establish a scholarship programme for the island's children and, through the guesthouse he built, Caohagan House, kept bridging visitors from around the world with life on the island — treating his own life there and his contribution to its community as inseparable. Over his lifetime he wrote nine books, some of which have been translated into Chinese and Korean. It feels like a record only someone who had lived fully on both sides — inside the organisation, and then at a deliberate distance from it — could have written.