As I pondered this strange image of
Michio
Kushi hawking an elixir-type supplement
of some kind on youtube.com,
I was immediately filled with many thoughts and emotions
that took me all the way back to my early days in Boston
as a student of Michio, as if a part of my life were
flashing before my eyes. I kept wondering why I was
having this strange experience. It seemed as if something
in me was dying, or had died.
It is good to remember that Michio,
like many Japanese of his generation,was greatly affected
by the destruction of Japan in World War II, particularly
as a soldier witnessing the aftermath of the bombings
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In my eyes, one of the drivers of Michio's
dream of macrobiotics was to restore the original dignity,
nobility and spirit of Japan and Japanese culture. When
I once brought this up with him, he reacted angrily
in denial.
As I mentioned to some friends at dinner the other night,
the Japanese of that era subscribed to a completely
different reality than most of us can conceive. Once
you are brought up and conditioned in a cultural paradigm
such as mythic Japan, or even Western culture for that
matter, it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive
that there could be some other way to see or be in the
world. Michio had never made the jump into the modern
Western era.
That probably accounts for why his Japanized English
never improved. He is Japanese through and through.
Michio loved Kurosawa films. I went with
him on many occasions. Akira
Kurosawa had the uncanny gift of being able to bring
that heroic and romanticized spirit of Japan to the
screen. The Japanese of that era encountered each other
as spirit, not matter or physical form, as they played
out some ritualized myth that belonged to the Gods.
The Japanese inhabited a different world space, they
breathed a different cultural air so to speak. It was
more dream-like, romantic, and mythic most of all. It
was the domain of the Gods playing out their destinies
on this earth.
I was once allowed entry into this remarkable
space. It was after my first six months in Japan in
1975. I was practically penniless at the time. I came
across a remarkable book, a treatise on Shinto, the
indigenous religion of
Japan that narrates the birth of Japan and the world
as it descended from the Gods.
I spent six months firmly fixated on understanding these
mythological texts of Japan. After several months, the
myths taken from the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki came alive
and took on a life of their own, the subject-object
relation I had with the book dissolved, and I could
see my future before me like one could see a tree standing
before oneself.
I would meet my future wife, it revealed,
on the Emperor's birthday, coincidently my mother's
birthday, which was several months away. The Emperor
is a direct descendent of the Gods and the main living
figure in the Shinto pantheon.
He is the only one who can approach the inner sanctum
of the Grand
Shrines of Ise, which houses the central object
of worship, an eight-sided mirror. On the 29th of April,
a national holiday in Japan due to the Emperor's birthday,
I found myself on an outing to a well-known Shinto shrine
in north Kyoto with a number of students I was teaching
English at the time. As it turned out, one of those
students became my wife Mutsuko, whom some of you may
know.
Well, I am only sharing this to capture
and acknowledge the courageous and heroic stand that
Michio took to preserve that part of the Japanese spirit
that was eternal, timeless and belonged to the Gods.
If you really think for
a moment of all the lives that have been touched and
the focus that diet and health now play in all our lives,
it is the result of his commitment and stand. Yes, it
is true that there have been failures as well, but how
can you have the successes without the failures.
The Japanese, more than any other, preserved
the spirit of the ancient world. Perhaps, that is why
I am feeling this strange kind of sadness, that that
flame has finally gone out. We are now on our own perhaps
and Michio
has completed his task as best he could. Who knows?
Also read: Where’s
the Beef?…Woops,…I Mean Zen? by Greg Johnson
Greg Johnson
is the executive director of the Community Health Foundation
(CHF), the parent organisation of Concord Institute.
In 1970, he began studying macrobiotics with Michio
Kushi, the foremost educator and authority on macrobiotics.
Macrobiotics, the ancient art and science of health
and longevity, was reintroduced in the West with a distinct
Oriental flavour by Nyoichi Sakurazawa in the 1950s
and by several of his disciples, Herman Aihara and Michio
Kushi, in the 1960s. In 1973, Greg encountered the transformational
work of Werner Erhard, who had developed a group process
intended to bring contextual awareness to our life situation.
In subsequent years, including 10 years
in Japan, he sought the opportunity to integrate these
two bodies of work into a single cohesive educational
curriculum. Seeing these as expressions of a major reconciliation
of mind and body and East and West, his search came
to fruition in 1994, when he received word of the potential
closing of a leading macrobiotic educational organisation
in London, the Community Health Foundation, due to the
loss of their director and a dire financial situation.
After reviewing his proposal, the trustees of the organisation
hired him as their director, opening the way for a major
reinvention of the educational curriculum that has guided
the organisation for the past 13 years.
Posted: 8th
May2008
