Mokichi Okada - Shumei, agriculture and spirituality
Posted by: isiria, in A BETTER WORLD, SUSTAINABLE LIVING, culture, spirituality
I’ve decided, I will read the Orion Magazine more often; I would even even subscribe to it if they would offer a web or software edition of it (which they seem to be working on). Here’s another article on a topic close to my heart: living sustainably not just in accordance with scientific or common sense principles, but in a deeper unity whose practical expressions go very much against our rational understanding of life and the economic maxims on how to make a living.
Under the title “Land, Farmer, Community: A Sacred Trust To Create Heaven on Earth“, Lisa M. Hamilton writes about a community in Japan called Shumei. Lisa visited Susumu Hashimoto whom she describes as the happiest person she’s ever met. “His smile is constant and electric. Even in the rain, his face seems to glow.” Hashimoto derives his happiness from farming, which he sees as the basis to accomplish - world peace!
Hashimoto’s unexpected and somewhat puzzling approach to a profession that not just in Australia but also in Japan is often associated with debt, dispossession, and even suicide, is not totally unique; what he does is called shizen nouhou, or natural agriculture. “It’s part of the devotional practice of the spiritual group Shumei, which claims 370,000 members in Japan and around the world”, and the group’s long term goal is nothing less but to create heaven on earth.
Shizen nouhou “is based on the teachings of Mokichi Okada, whose unique philosophy came as a response to living through the two world wars. He believed that healing the world would come from relearning how to respect life. One of the avenues Okada chose for this was agriculture, which he saw as humans’ fundamental connection to the natural world. He taught that humans ought to stop treating the Earth as a thing to subjugate and instead adopt a relationship of humble coexistence. Through his new way of growing and eating food, humans would learn to trust in the Earth to sustain them, and in return agree to care for it. As people learned to show respect, gratitude, and compassion toward the natural world, they would do the same for all beings, including their fellow humans. So while on the surface natural agriculture looks like plain old farming—planting, harvesting, selling—it is actually, as Hashimoto said, a way of learning to care for life and improve society.”
Not surprisingly, this humble and respectful approach to the Earth and its people leads to behaviours and interactions that are diametrically opposed to our contemporary way of life. Shumei farmers for example don’t control or manage the land - they surrender to it. They deal with what we call pests not by spraying, but by observing what is happening in a pest affected environment and learning from these observations how to make plants stronger. They also don’t add anything to the soil, not even compost - in their eyes that would be an expression of them not trusting the power inherent in the land. Instead they might change whatever plans they had for a particular field, for example by planting different crops or changing the crop cycle. This way of interacting with land, of working solely within its own potential, can lead to lower yields or even to none at all. But that does not concern the Shumei - “their goal is not quantity; it is to cultivate compassion, respect, and gratitude”.
But even for Shumei farmers, in many (if not most) situations this is a an almost certain way of creating an unviable business, which often does not even guarantee their own survival - and this is where the Shumei community at large comes in. It depends on its farmers for food and they depend on their community for growing it. With both knowing this mutual dependency and, even more importantly, sharing the same spiritual values, their support system seems to work well. “In the greater Tokyo area, a network of eleven farmers feeds fifteen hundred urban families, supplying all their produce, rice, and soybeans.” Quite mind-boggling, really, from our western, capitalistic and ego-centric perspective: by focusing on the sacred rather than the material, people as a community create sustainable survival which could not be guaranteed either for the group nor the individual producer without that synergy.
How does it practically work? Simple: the farmers farm, and the consumers create a support system that enables the farmers “to focus on spiritual priorities rather than production”. “Consumers run the distribution system. They take orders, collect money, package, sort, and deliver. They publish newsletters, organize farm tours, and host celebrations. Because supporting the farmers means adopting a seasonal diet, they give cooking classes. To replace commercially processed foods like miso and tofu, they learn to process soybeans at home. And when farmers need them in the field, they become farmers, too. The traditional hierarchy of agriculture - land serves farmers, farmers serve consumers - is replaced with a three-way partnership.”
Lisa Hamilton provides a wonderful story from her meeting with Hashimoto that shows the philosophy being alive and thriving. A few years ago, Hashimoto barely broke even, but his plan of planting more rice was jeopardised by the fact that he could hardly keep up with weeding. So he decided to rent more fields and adopt them out to his customers. “After he planted, they would do the weeding, as well as contract to buy a year’s worth of the rice at a price that reflected their paddy’s total yield—incentive to do their work well.”
Ten people signed up, people from the city, not used to farm work at all. “Throughout the summer they worked, barefoot and bent over in the blazing sun. They spent far more time there than anyone had predicted; some drove five hours just to get to the farm. In the end, the price for their rice was markedly higher than in a supermarket, even for organic. By conventional standards, not a great deal.
Yet the next year they all signed up again. Turns out they had enjoyed every minute. They had brought their whole families, and their children had relished the chance to catch frogs and squish mud through their toes. The families had asked Hashimoto to teach them to do more than weed. One man, Hideki Oonishi, had even driven out in winter to visit his fallow field. After planting the next spring, Hashimoto watched him photograph the seedlings as if they were his children.
The extra rice kept Hashimoto in business, but what mattered more to him was the new crop of people in his fields. He explained that as a natural agriculture farmer his work is to care deeply for plants and land; in doing so he produces not just food, but love. Every person who joined him meant that love multiplied.” He talked about each and every family, saying that love would lead to something bigger. Then he smiled, and there was nothing more to say.
[Photography by Lisa M. Hamilton, a California writer and photographer who is working on a book titled “Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness”]
To find an answer, Solnit looks for example at two people producing a piece of music on the internet, each sitting in his own space, alone and connecting to the other via a stream of electric particles translated into sound and visual images. Sure, composing music often happens in solitude, but she rightly wonders about the traditional nature of musical collaboration, in which creativity arises from the complex interactions of personalities that fill the physical space between them - with words, emotions, body expressions, laughter, touch etc.. In this context, listening and acting to music as a social experience almost suggests itself as a parallel: creativity and social pleasure arise where sound and bodies conjunct, whether in dance, marching or making love. Collaboration in solitude in comparison seems somehow a nonsensical paradox.
Of course, nothing is absolute. Social networking in cypberspace, which cannot be separated from the web of commercial exploits, does not exclude people meeting in fleshspace; there are many examples where it even fosters new face-to-face relationships. It also teaches new skills, from reducing reaction times in a bit-sized world to creating new languages to learning to live in fast-changing new cultures, and it builds new communities and often a more tolerant world. And, in any case, technological changes (especially those in information technology) aren’t the only ones affecting the richness of human life - we happily embrace many of the material and spatial ones (Solnit mentioned for example the rapidly growing suburbias, filled with big mansions that are deserted because its owners are battling to earn the money to pay them off - often leaving their children part-time parent-less).
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