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His life study of diet and health has led him now to teach that the fish that the Japanese were historically accustomed to eat is now deadly, saturated with poisons and toxic metals. So too the rice that is the core of the Japanese diet, particularly the brown rice which retains more of the petrochemical industry promulgated poisons. Add to that the poisoned fruit and vegetables -- and all the oil-rich and processed foods -- and the rapidly declining health of the Japanese public and global community is well understood.

Asai also attempts to dispell the image of Japan as the summit of longevity in today's world. The statistics being perhaps artificially warped by the fact that elderly Japanese are maintained for many extra years by the hospitals and resting homes, without seeming mental presence, in bed-confined states. The numbers are equally skewed by the articially low numbers of infant deaths in Japan, due to the extensive surgery and other drug practices of the medical industry. He sites the traditional reference of the Transcaucasian Mountain peoples between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan and Georgia, as perhaps the pinnacle of personal longevity. Consequence of a life-style clinging the mountains-sides, drinking the mountain spring water?

My Japanese Oji-I-San (Grandfather) lived to 103 years, and still tended the grounds of his rice-farm, on hands and knees, until he was a hundred. In the last years of his intellectual and conversational presence he claimed that I would live to a longer span than he -- though this accolade might be somewhat colored by the observation that 2-3 years later he was claiming to have lived 137 years -- his calendrical counting accelerating like the windblown leaves from the trees of his final seasons.

Oji-I-San was the village math teacher, and bicycled everywhere throughout his life, never taking to the automobile. He never threw anything away, even saving every single grain of rice left over in his rice bowl, to be made into paper glue at his writing desk.

Does Toshio Asai save every grain of rice, and recycle all his kitchen and (minimal) household waste to the garden? I have no doubts.

Toshio-sama repeats that essentially all health problems result from overeating, which is the (dying) Western cultural norm. He advocates a return to growing your own food, eating locally, growing organically, and culturing lots of probiotics. Specifically he recommends a diet of organic white rice, supplemented by cultured vegetables ... or 'pickles' as they are named in Japan. And eliminating the Western and Junk foods in order to create a healthy diet. He points out that Kombucha, Miso, Natto, and other cultured foods are much healthier than the uncultured varieties.

Clearly he can't go wrong in Japan, advocating an economy centered around locally grown white rice!

O-Genki Deska?