Wealth & Money Quote by Kenji Miyazawa

A line like this lands with the deceptively simple force of a folk song and the moral bite of a manifesto. Miyazawa doesn’t praise happiness as a private achievement; he treats it like infrastructure, something a society either builds for everyone or hoards for the already-protected. The opening contrast, “Not just the rich and the strong,” names the usual winners without melodrama, then flips the frame: if happiness is only available to those with money and power, it isn’t happiness so much as a perk of dominance.

The quiet radicalism is in “must.” This isn’t a wish, or a soothing pastoral sentiment. It’s an ethical demand that assumes happiness is distributable - and therefore that its absence is not a personal failing but a social design problem. “Share” also matters: it implies relationship, responsibility, and sacrifice. Someone has to give up the idea that comfort is earned proof of virtue.

Context sharpens the edge. Miyazawa wrote in early 20th-century Japan, when modernization was accelerating and rural communities - especially farmers in places like Iwate, where he lived and worked - bore the costs. His Buddhist-inflected humanism and sympathy for the agrarian poor show up here as a refusal to romanticize hardship. The subtext is a critique of systems that treat inequality as natural order: if happiness can be “shared equally,” then unequal suffering is not fate; it’s policy, culture, and complacency.

Poetry becomes the Trojan horse. The sentence is plain, almost childlike, but it smuggles in a collectivist ethics: the measure of a life isn’t personal serenity, it’s whether your well-being is compatible with your neighbor’s.