Meaning
At first glance, “if you do it, it will be done” can sound like a simple call to willpower. But read through to the second half — “whatever goes undone is simply because someone left it undone” — and it becomes clear that the poem’s real point is not exhortation but pinpointing where the cause lies. When something fails to happen, instead of blaming luck, circumstance, or talent, it narrows the reason to a single fact: the person did not do it. This is not a line meant to shame, but one meant to make the next action instantly clear.
Within the poem’s traditional five-line waka form, the same root verb — “do” — recurs four times, shifting shape each time: “do it,” “don’t do it,” “goes undone,” “left undone.” This is no mere wordplay; the repetition quietly impresses on the listener the logic that action, and action alone, is what separates one outcome from the other.
Yozan did not rescue a domain on the verge of bankruptcy through willpower alone. It was the accumulation of concrete acts — frugality, land reclamation, the promotion of new industries — that gave this poem its staying power. It endures not as a slogan, but as words backed by practice.
Lesson for Today
When your feet freeze at the thought that "I might try and still fail," this poem hands the cause back into your own hands rather than leaving it out there somewhere. Today, pick the one thing you keep putting off, and simply begin it without worrying yet about the outcome. Just as Yozan moved an overwhelming task — rescuing a bankrupt domain — through the accumulation of small concrete acts like frugality and land reclamation, the answer to "can it be done" only ever appears after you've started, never before. Put today's first step ahead of tomorrow's excuse — that is this poem in practice.
Background
This waka is traditionally said to have been given as one of fourteen articles of precepts (posted on a wall) to the retainers serving Akitaka — Yozan's own son, then age nine, who had just been made heir-apparent to Yozan's adopted successor Haruhiro — around 1785, the year the thirty-five-year-old Yozan retired and formally handed the lordship itself to Haruhiro (confirmed across multiple sources, including the official Yonezawa City website and Japan's National Diet Library reference database; Yozan gave Haruhiro a separate document at that same handover, the "Denkoku no Ji"). At the time, Yonezawa's domain finances were on the brink of collapse, with accumulated debt roughly twenty times its annual income — so dire that returning the domain to the shogunate was even considered. From the age of seventeen, when he first became lord, Yozan had cut his own living expenses and rebuilt the domain through land reclamation and the promotion of new industries. This single poem is not abstract theorizing but a statement of conviction drawn directly from that practice of reform.