Thinking about Life

I first understood that cooking is a chemical reaction when I made a dish called azuki squash for the first time. Azuki squash is a dish made by simply boiling adzuki beans and winter squash together in water and seasoning it with salt, but the flavors of the two ingredients combine to make it very delicious. It's as if a chemical reaction occurs between the two while they are boiling, bringing out a flavor that can't be achieved by simply boiling them separately and combining them. Making azuki squash is very easy. Just boil the adzuki beans in a pot until they are soft, then add the squash and wait for the squash to cook. Once the beans are cooked, season with a little salt. Cut the squash into bite-sized pieces and rub with a little salt. Place it on top of the boiled red beans, cover, and heat until the squash is cooked. Once the squash is cooked, arrange it on the plate and it's done. It is very rare to come across a restaurant that serves a dish calle...

The main point of Chapter 5, "The Nature of Wisdom and Talent," is to eat the right foods and grow into a healthy, wise, and resourceful person. To achieve this, you should eat a proper diet of grains and vegetables when you are young to develop your wisdom, and then when you become an adult and enter society, eat more omnivorous foods such as meat and fish to develop your talents. Intelligence or talent is the quality of the animal-based natron salt, and is associated with good decision-making ability and quick processing of things, but also with many mistakes. On the other hand, wisdom is the quality of the plant-based potassium salt, and although each action is slow, it is steady and makes few mistakes. In other words, whether one becomes a person with a lot of intelligence (talent) or wisdom depends on what one eats. Compared to the past, people today value quick-witted, quick-decisive, and talented people. However, to complete a big project, you need to be thoughtful and...

I have introduced "The Healthy Food of Sagen Ishizuka " 4 times, but there are only two more posts to go. It takes a lot of my time and effort after my last post to introduce the final part of the book, the alkaline  couple  theory (couples of natron and potash salt). This is because no matter how many times I read Chapter 4, which describes the nature, effects, and results of  the alkaline  couple  theory , I found it difficult to understand, and I had no idea which part to extract in order to interest readers in this section. What is the alkaline couple theory that Sagen preached, and how should we use the alkaline couple theory when thinking about things? In conclusion, the alkaline couple theory is difficult to understand, so it cannot be explained in a simple way. I hope that each person will study it thoroughly and deepen their understanding. Below I will list some key points that will be important in understand...

According to Sagen, the necessity of bathing is to cleanse the body, refresh the mind, improve blood circulation, promote digestion and absorption, increase sweating, and excrete natron salts that have accumulated in the body. The frequency and temperature of bathing that each person prefers varies depending on the region they live in, the foods they normally eat, and their occupation. People who eat gourmet food on a daily basis or who take in a lot of salt because they do vigorous exercise tend to accumulate natron salt in their bodies, and prefer more baths and higher water temperatures than people who normally eat simple foods. It also varies by region, with people who live on the warmer southern sea side needing to bathe more frequently and in higher water temperatures than people who live on the northern mountain side. In the past, coastal cities in Osaka, Chugoku, Shikoku, and Kyushu had steam baths separate from bathing facilities. This was a way to desalt the body, but it disa...

  Ishizuka Sagen taught that "if your diet is unhealthy, your mind and body will also become abnormal, and if your diet is healthy, both your mind and body will be normal." The healthy diet that Sagen speaks of is for people to follow their natural duty as granivores and to eat mainly unrefined grains that are appropriate for the region. In Japan, this means eating mainly brown rice. Brown rice has bran on it, and as the Chinese character for bran (糠) is a combination of the character for rice (米) and the character for health (康), eating rice with the bran will make you healthy. On the other hand, white rice (白米) is white (白) and is a residue (粕), so eating white rice is the same as eating something with low nutritional value. Sagen pointed out that the reason for the increase in the number of sick people in Japan after the Meiji Restoration from 1868 was that the culture of eating white rice spread throughout the country, and that people also began to regularly eat white bre...