Ohsawa-George-The-Macrobiotic-Movement-12.pdf

George Ohsawa, The Macrobiotic Movement

Part 1

A Special Exhibit - The History of Soy Pioneers Around the World - Unpublished

Manuscript

by William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi

The international macrobiotic movement was started by a remarkable and widely traveled

Japanese, George Ohsawa, who was joined in this work in the late 1930s by his new wife,

Lima. Ohsawa linked Oriental philosophy and diet using a new version of the ancient

concept of yin-yang, a unique dialectical principle, which pointed at an underlying order in

the universe, beneath its apparent diversity. The keys to Ohsawa's philosophy of diet and

medicine were the concepts of balance and the practice of a traditional grain centered diet.

He taught that a traditional, balanced diet was the basis of good health, upon which true

happiness and freedom rest. He made the remarkable discovery that the age-old concept of

grains as the principal food in the diet, a sacred food in virtually every traditional society,

had largely vanished from the West (Ohsawa 1965). In the process of introducing

macrobiotics to the West, Ohsawa and his followers have played a major role in

introducing traditional East Asian soyfoods as well, although the latter comprised only a

part of their total message. In this chapter we will emphasize their work as it applies to

soyfoods.

Our key source of information on the origins of macrobiotics and the life and work of

Ohsawa is Georges Ohsawa and the Japanese Religious Tradition by Ronald E. Kotzsch

(1981). We have drawn on it heavily, and to a lesser extent on Ichiro Matsumoto's

biography of Ohsawa (1976, in Japanese) and "A Historical Review of the Macrobiotic

Movement in North America" in Kushi's The Book of Macrobiotics (1977). Much of our

information for the rest of the chapter has come from extensive interviews with leaders of

the macrobiotic movement in the U.S., Japan, and Europe.

The Roots of Macrobiotics . Ohsawa never claimed to be the founder or originator of

macrobiotics (a term meaning "great life or vitality"). He always gave credit to his own

teacher, a Japanese doctor, Sagen Ishizuka, and both in turn were inspired by The Yellow

Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine (Ref??), the classics of Shinto (the native Japanese

religion), and the work of Ekiken Kaibara and Nanboku Mizuno. Manabu Nishibata, a

disciple of Ishizuka's, also had an important influence on Ohsawa.

The Nei Ching Huang Ti or Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine , probably

written about 500 B.C., is a compilation of the medical wisdom of the ancient Chinese. It

contends that there is a profound relationship between food, health, and disease, and that

food is an important means of treating disease. The particular importance and power of

cereal grains for preserving and restoring health is clearly stated. Ohsawa often quoted its

admonition that "The true sage is concerned not with the cure of disease but with its

prevention." Nutrition and medicine were seen as very closely related fields and health

was considered the natural reward of a life of self-control and moderation, lived in

conformity with the laws of Nature.

The Shinto classics such as the Kojiki (compiled in 712 A.D.) and the Nihonshoki (720

A.D.) state that the god of food produced the "five grains" (including soybeans and azuki

beans) out of his own body as sustenance for humans. For over a thousand years at Japan's

most famous shrine at Ise, this deity has been worshipped in the form of brown rice. Rice

and other foods have always played a key role in the annual ritual cycle.

Ekiken Kaibara (1630-1714) was a student of Chinese literature and Oriental medicine,

who also wrote about philosophy (primarily Confucian), ethics, education, and natural

history. In his highly influential book Yojokun (Treatise on the Nourishment of Life), he

described a regimen for maintaining good health by avoiding all types of self-indulgence.

He encouraged people to "Eat less, sleep less, desire less," to avoid meat, and to practice a

form of self-massage called do-in . Kaibara believed that every wise person's birthright was

to delight in the simple but profound pleasures of heaven and earth, and a life span of 100

years.

Nanboku Mizuno, who lived in the mid-1700s and early 1800s, was the father of Japanese

physiognomy. After years of study and observation as an attendant in a Japanese public

bath, a barber, and a worker in a crematorium, he wrote the great Japanese classic on

physiognomy, the Nanboku Soho (Nanboku Method of Physiognomy), a ten-volume work

published between 1788 and 1805. He felt that a person's character and past and future

fortunes could be discerned by careful observation of physical characteristics, and that a

person could change his inherited longevity through proper diet.

Dr. Sagen Ishizuka (1850-1910) grew up and was educated at a time when Western

culture, including "scientific" medicine and nutrition, was being imported into Japan. (In

1883, for example, the Japanese government prohibited the practice of traditional medical

techniques such as acupuncture, herbal medicine, and moxabustion, and established

Western medicine as the official mode of treatment.) Afflicted by a kidney infection,

young Ishizuka had been unable to cure himself by Western medicine, so he turned to the

study of Oriental medicine. This expanded into a lifelong interest in food and health, while

he served as a physician in the military. In 1897 he published the results of his studies in a

voluminous work entitled A Chemical-Nutritional Theory of Long Life . A popularized

version of this difficult, technical work appeared in 1899 as A Nutritional Theory of the

Mind and Body: A Nutritional Method for Health . The second book was extremely

popular, and was reprinted 23 times.

Ishizuka's research led him to conclude that the balance of potassium (K) and sodium (Na)

salts in the body was the prime determinant of health, that food is the main factor in

maintaining this balance, and that food must therefore be the basis for curing disease and

maintaining health. Food is the highest medicine. Man is by nature a granarian and his

optimal diet should be based on cereal grains, which have a K/Na ratio of roughly 2.5.

Ishizuka saw Westerners as sodium-dominant people (animal products are high in sodium)

characterized by materialism, selfishness, individualism, and a drive for sensory

gratification. Upon his retirement Ishizuka devoted himself to teaching and private

practice. In 1908 he and his disciples founded the Shokuyo-kai (food-nourishment

movement), which taught people of the problems with the new Western diet, rich in meat,

sugar, and refined foods. They urged a return to the traditional Japanese diet based on

whole grains, vegetables, and soyfoods. Ishizuka saw many patients daily and cured them

with food. He was renowned for his success in healing people considered incurable by

standard Western methods. Thus while most Japanese were being swept away by the great

tide of Westernization, gradually abandoning their own culture and traditions (including

their food and healing arts), Ishizuka and his associates viewed this trend critically; they

attempted to borrow and synthesize only the good points, while preserving the endangered

"national essence of Japan."

A disciple of Ishizuka's, Dr. Manabu Nishibata, developed the basic concept that food

should be chosen according to the principle of Shin-do fu-ni , meaning "the body and earth

are not two." Accordingly, people should care for their environment as they would their

own body, for in fact the two are constantly flowing into one another. Likewise people

should learn the joy of flowing with the great seasonal rhythms of the earth, choosing

foods according to time and place, locally and in season, in harmony with the Order of the

Universe.

The Life of George Ohsawa . George Ohsawa was born on 18 October 1893 in an eastern

suburb of Kyoto, Japan. His name at birth was Joichi Sakurazawa. He had an unhappy

childhood in a disenfranchised, broken samurai family. (The Meiji Restoration abolished

the privileges of the samurai class.) His formal education stopped with a commercial high

school, since he was too poor to continue. But he was an excellent student and he

continued his education on his own with great drive throughout his life, reading

voraciously in several languages on a remarkably wide range of vital subjects. While

Ohsawa was still a boy his mother died of tuberculosis. Her first two children (daughters)

had both died in their infancy. She had tried to introduce a Western style diet into her

family's meals, hoping that it would make them healthier. In 1911 George's younger

brother died of tuberculosis at age 16 and a short time later, at age 18, George himself was

diagnosed as having tuberculosis; he was given little chance of survival. By good fortune

he happened to find one of Ishizuka's books in a library. Ishizuka had died two years

previously and Ohsawa had not met him. Ohsawa tried the recommended diet of brown

rice and cooked vegetables, with small amounts of oil and salt; soon the tuberculosis

disappeared. Ohsawa continued to practice this simple diet. After working for three years

with a trading firm in Kobe, he joined the Shoku-yo group (which Ishizuka had founded) in

1916. In 1923 Ohsawa gave up his business career and became a full-time staff employee

with the group. Until 1929 he was general superintendent and head of publications. From

1937-1939 he was president. In 1927 (Kotzsch Bibliog says 1929), at age 34, with Manabu

Nishibata, he wrote his first book, The Physiology of the Japanese Spirit . Here he began to

use the terms yin and yang , which even Ishizuka had used broadly to refer to sodium and

potassium type foods. In 1928 Ohsawa wrote a eulogistic biography of Ishizuka. By that

time he had been married and divorced either two or three times.

A new chapter in Ohsawa's life opened in 1929 when, at age 36, he set out for Paris to

introduce the philosophy and practice of Shoku-yo (food and nourishment, which he later

called "macrobiotics") to the Western world. In what was then the intellectual and cultural

capital of the West, he aspired to be a cultural bridge. In 1931 his first book in French was

published, Le Principe Unique de la Philosophie et de la Science d'Extreme Orient . It was

well received and he began to move in cultured circles. After a brief return to Japan in

1932 to oppose the growing militarism there, he went back to Paris and in 1934 wrote

Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine , the first book on this subject in English. His work

influenced English and German acupuncture writers such as Lawson-Wood.

In 1936 he returned to Japan, where he stayed for 17 long and turbulent years. He actively

opposed the ultra nationalism, militarism, and expansionism, while increasing his efforts

as president of the Shoku-yo group. In 1939, however, he was asked to resign because of

conflicts largely caused by his antigovernmental political activities, but also by his

personality and philosophy. In 1937, at age 44, he married Lima, who was 38 and whose

real?? first name was Sanae. She began to accompany him on many of his lecture tours

teaching macrobiotic cooking. Since 1936 much of his time had been devoted to individual

health and medical consultations and to writing. Now he decided to try to establish a new

organization to convert Japan to shoku-yo , which he presented as the solution to all the

country's problems. The struggle with the West, he maintained, should be ideological, not

military, lest Japan be defeated. Once the war began, Ohsawa promoted shoku-yo as a

means to achieve victory. By 1942 a war euphoria was sweeping Japan, but by 1943 things

started to get bad. Together with his wife Lima and daughter Fumiko, plus a few intimate

disciples, Ohsawa retreated to a remote mountain village in Yamanashi prefecture, called

Hi no Maru (Haru??) His antiwar activities continued and in January 1945 he was

imprisoned, questioned, and severely mistreated. He believed he would die, but finally,

one month after the bomb fell on Hiroshima, he was released--gaunt, crippled, and 80%

blind.

After the war, Ohsawa recovered slowly. He worked to make shoku-yo the guiding

principle for the reconstruction of the nation. In 1947 he became involved with the World

Federalist Movement, which was trying to seek world peace through world government.

He tried to introduce his teachings on food into their program, and he began to call himself

a "citizen of the world." From 1946-1952 he ran a school (which he called "Centre

Ignoramus" or "World Government Association") in the town of Hiyoshi between Tokyo

and Yokohama. There he began to gather and teach a small group of devoted disciples,

who would later spread his teachings throughout the world. In 1949 he changed his name

from Joichi Sakurazawa to George (or Georges) Ohsawa; George sounded like Joichi, the

"s" on the end had to do with his love of France and French writers, and Ohsawa was

written with the same characters as Sakurazawa, but pronounced differently. At the same

time, he first began to call his philosophy and teachings "macrobiotics." The origin of this

term is uncertain. Kotzsch (1981) feels that he probably borrowed it from the 19th century

German philosopher and physician, Christolph Wilhelm von Hufeland. In 1860 von

Hufeland had written a book about a method for achieving health and longevity, which he

called Makrobiotik, Die Kunst des Menschliche Lebens zu Verlaengern ("Macrobiotics, the

Art of Prolonging Human Life"). However Herman Aihara, a close student of Ohsawa,

feels that Ohsawa did not know of von Hufeland's work or term, and that Ohsawa coined

the term independently himself. At this time Ohsawa adopted the Western practice of

having his students call him by his first name, George. He gave almost all of his students

new, Westernized first names (such as Cornellia, Roland, Herman, etc.), taking these from

great Western men and women born in the same month. The names were meant to show

that the students were citizens of the world, not merely Japan. It was a personal choice

whether to use the Westernized name or not; many chose not to. Ohsawa then began to

dispatch his more accomplished prote'ge's, who were eager to spread the teachings to

foreign lands. In 1949 Michio Kushi, a law student at Tokyo University, went to New York

to study at Columbia University. Herman Aihara went to New York in 1952. Later others

went to France, Brazil, Germany, and elsewhere.

In October 1953, a few days before his 60th birthday, George and Lima embarked on a

new phase of their lives. He called it the "World Journey of the Penniless Samurai."

Herman Aihara (1980) noted that like the salmon, Ohsawa decided to take his most

adventurous trip late in his life. He hoped to spread macrobiotics around the world, making

it a basic principle not only of personal and spiritual health but of world peace as well. The

couple first spent 18 months in India teaching and studying macrobiotics. They then went

to Africa for several months, where George had a deep spiritual awakening (at age 62) and

later tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Dr. Albert Schweitzer of his philosophy and

practice. Having healed himself of a reputedly incurable tropical disease using only

macrobiotics, he and Lima then flew to Paris in early 1956. There the most important

phase of his teaching and writing began. Most of the last decade of his life was spent in

Western Europe and America, were he developed a small but dedicated following.

In 1959 Muso Shokuhin (originally called Osaka CI or "Centre Ignoramus"), a macrobiotic

food company, was started in Osaka, Japan by Mr. Shuzo Okada. Although Ohsawa was

not involved in founding the company, he was an active supporter and associate. Muso

played an important role in introducing macrobiotic foods to both Japan and the West.

They first began exporting soyfoods (miso and natural shoyu) in 1963, to Lima, a

macrobiotic food company in Belgium (see below). Their soyfoods exports to the U.S.

started in 1966, when barley miso was sent to Chico-san in California. Total exports,

including exports of miso and shoyu, expanded greatly during the 1970s.

By the late 1950s Ohsawa's work in Europe was bearing a rich harvest. In 1959 3,000

people attended a macrobiotic summer camp in France. That same year some dedicated

Belgian followers, Pierre Gevaert and friends, started a macrobiotic food manufacturing

and distribution company called Lima, which established and contracted with organic

farmers and made quality macrobiotic foods available in Europe for the first time. In 1959

Lima started to make natural shoyu (aged for at least 3 years) and barley miso, and soon

began importing fine natural foods, including miso and shoyu, from Japan. In about 1958 a

German businessman who had heard Ohsawa lecture on natural shoyu had quickly and

cleverly registered the word "shoyu" as his own trademark, so the macrobiotic movement

was forced to find an alternative term. Out of sheer necessity, and realizing it was slightly

inaccurate, they decided to call their natural shoyu by the name "tamari" (Lima Ohsawa

1983). At least this distinguished it from its chemically made counterparts (see Chapter

36). For the first time in European history, non-Oriental Europeans began to make miso

and shoyu a part of their daily diet. Later Lima exported macrobiotic foods to the U.S.A.

In 1961 Ohsawa's book Le Zen Macrobiotique appeared in France. It contained many

recipes, both medicinal and culinary, using miso and shoyu, and it also discussed tofu. In

early 1961, when Herman Aihara visited Europe, he reported that there were many

beautiful macrobiotic restaurants and clinics in France (the restaurants were Au Riz Dore

and Longue Vie), Belgium, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. In about 1962 Ohsawa

learned of Louis Kervran's unpublished work on "biological transmutation" and developed

an all-consuming interest in it. Two years later he claimed to have changed sodium into

potassium at low temperatures, accomplishing what only alchemists had formerly said they

could do, changing one element into another. These developments attracted little attention

(Why??). In 1964 his last European book was published: Le Cancer et la Philosophie

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