A micro-macroscopic vision
Recognition of the evolutionary process of history.
Everything has a history, and it’s amazing how difficult it is at times to separate fact from fiction. We all have an ambulant history it is part of the evolutionary process, always striving. Studying the history of medicine in the West and East and that of our criteria which include a focus on lifestyle that sees all individuals and families in terms of sickness/war and health/peace we can find some clarity amongst the confusing, utopic, dogmatic, and mystified illusions that abound.
For example the term “macrobiotic” has very little to do with the original term “Shokuyojo”.
Throughout history the human condition has faced the threat of death and illnesses, and if we look at all the ways of medicine in the inhabited corners of the earth we will be amazed at the diversity of approach; but many leaders have discovered that when facing problems of illness, misery and intranquility nature provides the answer. In studying sick animals it was noticed how they instinctively lost their appetite, and started fasting in order to recoup their originality/normality. And so they had just perceived how the majority of illnesses are causes by too much food! Excess, accumulation, stagnation, which impair normal functioning. Fasting purifies and normalises our psychosomatic selves.
Traditionally regional medicines such as Jewish, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Ayuvedic, Hypocratic and old Japenese include fasting as the most simple and easy, economic, ecological and strategic treatment for the recovery of physiological order.
In Japan the meat eating habit was occasional and connected to hunting before the influence of the west – and the introduction of more meat and sugar and consequent illness.
VARIOUS MASTERS
To understand the origin of macrobiotics we need to look at the influences of masters before George Oshawa. At the time of influence from the west lifestyle many Japanese families including Oshawas started including sugar, meat and dairy into the diet. In the middle of an international tendency his mother and brother ( aged 16 ) died of tuberculosis, having had no success with symptomatic western medicine. ISHIZUKA SAGEN (1850 –1910)
Looking at traditional medicine he discovered a doctor of the Japanese Imperial Army Ishizuka Sagen, who, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century had saved many lives by restricting the consumption of meat, sugar, fruits and processed food. Disillusioned with Western medicine he had returned to traditional medicine and feeding and became affectionately known as Dr Daikon, Dr Miso Soup and Dr Anti-Doctor!
Recognising and reintroducing traditional systems that were being abandoned, he and others such as Kaibara Ekiken and Mizuno Nanboku started to refer to ‘The book of the internal medicine of Emporer Amarelo’ written in the year 500.
So understanding that the traditional “Shoko-yo-kai” established by Dr Ishizuka and that the turning away from Western influence could save lives Oshawa was profoundly influenced.
KENZO FUTAKI. (1873 – 1966)
Another doctor Kenzo Futaki, with whom Oshowa and Tomio Kikuchi studied established the Tokyo College of medicine in conjuction with Robert Koch who got the Nobel Prize in 1905 for discovering the tuberculosis bacillus. After seriously studying western medicine Futaki became very doubtful of its’ pathological vision. Stressed by the conflict between traditional Japanese and symptomatic Western medicine he became ill and returned to his father, a traditional doctor, to make a recovery. This useful experience where he confirmed the power of controlling what entered his mouth by starting to eat vegetable and whole grain rice. He started to develop a dietry medical orientation called “Shokuyojo” which means something like “ perfecting the personality through food”. Dr Futaki received the Medal of National Honour from the Emporer for his work which is granted to very few people. With Kikuchi he also studied Aikido with the founding grandmaster Moriei Ueshiba.
A MORE ATTRACTIVE WORD.Georges Ohsawa (1893 –1966)
Having confirmed the wonder of ancient Japanese medicine Oshawa became more interested in the international field and he was interested in Ishizukas deepening undrstanding of Yin and Yang and Taoism.
After the second world war when Oshawa passed through many horrors, the ‘Hippie’ movement started to entrance young people in search of freedom, peace and love. Japan having lost the war and having historically been an isolated island felt even more isolated. Perceiving this Oshawa determined to stimulate the young but needed a more attractive word for Shokuyojo to share with western people. To-gether with his diciples he found the word macrobiotic that was first used by the German Dr Christolph Wilhelm von Hufeland in 1860 he wrote a book entitled MAKROBIOTIK – the art of prolonging human life which was based on vegetarianism. But this word in itself was still inadequate, insufficient so they modified it to ‘macrobiotic Zen’ – thus using to advantage the worldwide interest in Zen Buddism – at that time. So under this neologism Oshawas group of disciples set about educating the world about the traditional lifestyle of “Shoko-yojo” on the back of a wave of interest in ‘orientalism’.
DEMYSTIFYING MACROBIOTICS
TOMIO KIKUCHI
And so Kikuchi went to Brasil, Kushi to the USA, in the 50’s – with macrobiotics in mind. However Kikuchi, at first embracing macrobiotics was always doubtful about the ideas of ‘complete health’, ‘world peace’ and ‘perfect balance’. He felt that this sort of Utopian language based on unilateralism, and being more religious and superstitious in nature attracted many innocent people.
It is a great mistake to exclude illness – and to look for yin yang balance. In reality nothing is perfectly balanced and anyway if it was there would be no movement and that is life in some sense.
At the end of the 20th century Kikuchi gave a lecture entitled ‘demystifying Orientalism amd Macrobiotics’.
There are many examples of complete cancer cures through the macrobiotic diet and lifestyle where only a couple of years later the person died of cancer anyway. Why? Kikuchi is clear – it is because a therapeutic cure is offered without the SELF-EDUCATION.
THERAPY WITHOUT SELF_EDUCATION.
It is true if a person stops eating meat, sugar, dairy, and industrialised products, stops eating food that destroy the physiological order, the pathological symptoms of illness disappear in a spectacular way. The problem is without a solidary educational activity and surrounded by a consumeristic system the inevitable slide begins and the symptoms return – especially without the realisation that healing at least requires change in lifestyle habits and a focus on finding your inner self.
DANGEROUS CONSUMERISM.
Last year teacher Tomio Kikuchi was invited to endorse some fashionable super-consumeristic ‘natural’ merchandise – he refused –
IMMUNISING SELF-EDUCATION
Kikuchi intervened, to protect the Brazilian people from being duped into a dependence on unnecessary products, and explained that macrobiotics without microbiotics, without relating to the myriad of micro-organisms which support us, has no function anymore. Kikuchi did not arrive with verbal flowers, this was his private key of the preservation of the criteria of our disclosed educative activity, which have survived a long and hidden fight in one long historical process.
Therefore Kikuchi spoke, “To be only controlling Yin and Yang is Toaist mystification. We have to make things clear; without a third stimulating force called ‘Rang’ there is no function.”
In conclusion he said “ Our activity which we call Vitalising self-education apart from it’s main function to facilitate self-improvement, personality and consciousness complementarily teaches families and communities to produce independently as far as possible the indepensible products. Trying to evolve functional solidarity in each region – so as not to depend on trading giants and quacks and in this way face up to the catastrophic process that intensifies with the predominance of the corrupt capitalist system.