Page 22 RAIN July/August 1984 Masanobu Fukuoka (photo bi/ Halgar Shorter) News ofJapan's economic power permeates the media. We take for granted Japanese expertise in computers and management. But we rarely hear about the consequences ofJapan's productiveness. It's all too easy to assume that Japan has managed its ecology with zen and z-theory. Al Quarto is a poet and environmentalist who lives in Seattle. He's currently traveling with and writing a biography of an Australian aborigine. Previously, he spent about ten months working for Greenpeace in Japan, where he met a simple farmer who cherishes the ways of nature and seeks the root causes ofproblems. — TK Masanobu Fukuoka ami his stuiicnts (photo by Fiatgar Shorter) Japan's Dying Pines: Fukuoka's Last Straw by Alfred Quarto On the Japanese island of Shikoku, near Matsuyama Bay, lives an old man. He's called sensei, or teacher, by his students, who learned about the earth's nature and their own nature through his teachings. In most ways he appears to be an ordinary man, a simple farmer making his living from the land, but I soon learned that he was neither an ordinary farmer nor an ordinary man. I firsf learned of this man, Masanobu Fukuoka, when a friend in Japan lent me a copy of the book One-Straw Revolution (reviewed in RAIN IV:10), which describes his methods of "natural" farming. The concepts presented in the book offer an alfernative to the chemical treadmill that today permeates our agricultural endeavors world-wide. His one-straw revolution is a bloodless one: no governments are overthrown, no violent battles fought in the streets. Yet if his ideas were ever fully implemented, there would indeed be a change on a vast scale. For Fukuoka believes that people should work the land as farmers, become intimafe with their earthly roots through raising crops, and enrich the soil and their souls through natural farming. Indeed, within a country like Japan, where most farmers use chemical fertilizers and pesticides, Fukuoka's methods are revolutionary. He has established a method of farming that most closely approaches a natural way. His approach takes into account the processes within nature that have evolved over the history of the earth; he has proven that
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