Reading: One-Straw Revolution

In which I confess that I temporarily remove the interlibrary loan band to get a look at the cover!

Faerie joined me for the reading.

I read this gardening memoir/how-to book in December for a book club of Oregon and SW Washington bloggers and then did not manage to log in to the meeting successfully. I didn’t mind because it was a beautiful day outside during the book club time.

The philosophical author starts out talking about death, one of my favorite topics. (Favorite might be the wrong word.)

In his youth, he had what my mother called “a real job” which he quit to become a farmer. He describes how to grow rice without tilling, fertilizers or weed killers and explains how he sustains himself and, eventually, young people who would come on a pilgrimage to live and work on his farm, year round from his vegetable garden and orchard. (Japan’s climate allows for year round gardening.)

I was at first concerned by his anti-compost stance.

But preparing compost is my favorite thing! Fortunately, there was a footnote.

His practice of dropping straw directly in the rice field is very similar to Ann Lovejoy’s chop and drop method and to the way that Anne Wareham, in her book The Bad-Tempered Gardener, describes dropping plant clippings in place, as it doesn’t make sense to haul them away and then back, as compost, to the garden. I do some chopping and dropping but I really do love sifting my compost bins. (You can read more of my thoughts about Wareham’s excellent book here.)

And, whew, here is Mr. Fukuoka recommending compost for the veg garden.

I am in complete agreement with never using a rotovator (aka rototiller) as I believe it messes up the tilth of the soil. Various online articles agree with me, or rather, I agree with them.

Mr. Fukuoka believed if he could get that message out, the rice growing industry in Japan would be improved and the land would be saved. He felt the same about the use of chemicals on fruit, and especially about the waxing of Mandarin oranges…

….and he sold his unwashed and imperfect oranges to customers who wanted natural foods. Also, I had never thought about the effect of the frequent misting of produce in modern grocery stores. I wonder if it really does decrease nutrients?

What do you think?

Mr. Fukuoka deeply believed in a simple life.

His belief in “doing nothing” (meaning no compost, no tilling, no chemicals) in the rice field reminded me of one of the very first gardening books I ever read.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the Ruth Stout method and wondering if I can just pile mulch on top of my weeds without weeding them out first. I ponder that every time I plan on ordering a load of mulch.

Where I diverge from Mr. Fukuoka’s philosophy is in his thoughts about simplicity in food. I understand that it is because he ate year round from the garden and thus only ate food in season, but still….I want my food spicy and with strong flavors.

I do get the importance of learning to truly taste food before spicing it up. But what I miss most in the pandemic is going to restaurants where chefs worked hard to make the food complex and tasty.

He is anti-science, too, but I don’t even want to get into that problem.

Mr. Fukuoka believed that in olden days, farmers worked less and had time to write poetry, and he found the haikus to prove it.

I love the idea of simplicity but is it possible in the modern world? When we have no mortgage but still have high utilities and property tax, and when we feel we must have a phone and internet, how is a simple life of not working much even possible? And what about health insurance? Medicare costs us in the low hundreds every month.

He writes, People work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive.” Well, we literally did have to work like crazy to stay alive when we were paying $800 plus a month for our medical insurance with a big deductible, before the Affordable Care act came along and saved us from an increase that would have made our medical insurance cost 80 percent of our annual income.

“The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful [people] think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time.“ (He might have been thinking specifically of the work-obsessed culture of the “salary men” of Japan.)

Allan and I are about to find out if simplifying and not working (as much) is possible in the modern world. I would like it to be so because free time is enormously appealing to me. I’m already feeling the pressure of all the projects I want to get done before work starts and cannot seem to wrap my head around the idea that I may now have time for such projects in the summer. Even just cutting back one day a week because of the pandemic made this past summer rich in projects. (I have a feeling that projects are not when Mr Fukuoka means by free time.)

I must go back and pull something especially important out of the passages above. “I believe that if one fathoms deeply one’s own neighborhood and the everyday world in which one lives, the greatest of worlds will be revealed.”

In other words….

This philosophy greatly appeals to me…

“It would be well if people stopped troubling themselves about the ‘true meaning of life’; we can never know the answers to great spiritual questions but it’s all right to not understand.” (That is his emphasis.)

That reminds me of the twangy theme song for the telly show, The Leftovers, a popular tune by Iris Dement that I had not heard before.

“Everybody is a wonderin' where do they all came from
Everybody is a worryin' 'bout where
They're gonna go when the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be.”

So he returns to the subject of life and death.

This darling man….

Mr. Fukuoka’s life in retirement is what I am hoping for.

When I dipped into this book, I thought I wasn’t going to like it, and that it didn’t apply to my life because it looked to be all about rice farming. I read it anyway because of the book club and it gave me much to think about and introduced me to an eccentric character, my favorite kind. I’m grateful to Ann Amato for choosing it.

You can read more about Mr Fukuoka here , including some of the same skepticism I felt about whether simplicity as he lived it would work in other parts of the world. And in this article, you can see some photos of the farm and read about his last years, when he felt some despair about the modern world and about the effectiveness of his message. “The human world can be disappointing…. [People] seem pitifully unable to change their ways,” wrote Dr. Trent Brown in this second of three articles.

I hope that I’ve done a little bit in passing on the message that Mr. Fukuoka so wanted the world to hear. And I learned that he has another book, The Road Back to Nature, which I will seek out, and that he was perhaps tempestuous to work for (toward young people who traveled from afar to work on his farm, which felt similar to learning that Rosemary Verey had a difficult side). Well…”the human world can be disappointing”.