I am Masataka Tashiro, a gratitude researcher and author based in Japan.

I co-wrote The Gratitude Brain (Asuka Shinsha) with psychiatrist Dr. Shion Kabasawa. It has sold more than 50,000 copies in Japan and has been translated into Korean, Traditional Chinese and Thai. It is one of three books I have published, with roughly 70,000 copies in print in total.

My work sits in an unusual place — between the research on gratitude and the lived practice of it. I have sat with Lakota elders in a sweat lodge, prayed with Aymara people on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, and studied ritual with yuta shamans in Miyakojima.

In Japan, I completed the rebirth rite of Ko-Shugendo, a 1,400-year-old mountain ascetic tradition whose contents practitioners are forbidden to describe, even to their own children. Seven days without washing, without a clock, without a single word of explanation. I came down that mountain understanding gratitude in a way no book had taught me.

Today I run Sensui LLC, deliver corporate training in partnership with the Kyushu Productivity Center, and lead the One Million Thank-Yous Project, a community that turns ordinary moments into "arigato."

I teach the way I was taught on that mountain: no lesson without practice, and no practice without gratitude.