Born in 1787 to a farming family in Kayama village, Ashigara-kami District, Sagami Province (present-day Odawara, Kanagawa). His childhood name was Kinjiro. He lost his father at fourteen and his mother at sixteen, and was taken in by an uncle. Stripped of his fields and reduced to dire poverty, he applied himself to learning, reciting the 'Great Learning' from memory on the road while carrying firewood, and by such efforts as planting rapeseed on idle ground to trade for oil, he re-established his family before he was twenty. Hearing of his reputation, the Hattori family — senior retainers of Odawara Domain — entrusted him with restoring their finances, and he succeeded. From 1822, on the orders of the domain lord Okubo Tadazane, he directed the revival of over six hundred villages including the Sakuramachi fief in Shimotsuke (Moka, Tochigi). Preaching the thought of 'hotoku (repaying virtue)' with pillars of diligence, thrift, and 'suijo' (keeping one's allotted portion and yielding the surplus to others), he planted a spirit of self-help and mutual aid in the villagers. In 1853 he was appointed to a shogunal engineering post and began the revival of the Nikko shrine lands (the Nikko region of Tochigi). He died there in 1856 at the age of 69. He left the words, 'Economy without morality is crime; morality without economy is the raving of a sleeper.'

A practitioner and thinker who rose from dire poverty. A giant of a man (said to have stood 180 cm tall), blessed with physical strength, he rose and worked earlier than anyone. He held a distinctive practical ethic that fused rationalism with Confucian morality, Buddhist compassion, and Shinto modesty. Strong in numbers, he rebuilt village finances with compound-interest calculations and hundred-year plans. Hating ideals of the lips only, he always preached that 'virtue is found in labor' and insisted on hands-on practice.

After Meiji, Hotoku thought influenced Japanese-style business leaders such as Shibusawa Eiichi, Toyoda Sakichi, and Matsushita Konosuke, and became the ethical foundation for 'the unity of morality and economy' in Japanese capitalism. Before the war, the 'Kinjiro statue' — a boy reading a book with a load of firewood on his back — was set up in elementary schools nationwide as the symbol of diligent saving and a pillar of state moral education. Though denied for a time after the war, it has lately been reevaluated as a model of sustainable community management and rural renewal. The Hotoku Ninomiya Shrine at Odawara is the head shrine.