The One-Straw Revolution

by Masanobu Fukuoka

New York Review Books Classics, 2009

This is a book about rice, winter grain, and fruit tree farming in Japan and a meditation on the limits of human knowledge and language. Or, it is more accurate to say that it is a story about the limits of human knowledge and language, told through the lens of rice, winter grain, and fruit tree farming in Japan.

I have never grown rice or winter grains, and I probably never will. Yet, this book was absolutely captivating and exciting. Fukuoka’s approach to farming and to life is to seek non-action and avoid tasks, rather than taking them on. He sums up the basis for his “do nothing” farming method thus*: “All my research has been in the direction of not doing this or that. These thirty years have taught me that farmers would have been better off doing almost nothing at all.”

One feels immediately the urge to argue against this assertion. My initial counter-example was playing Go. Surely, doing nothing at all will not improve one’s Go game. Then I remember that the primary problem of weak Go players is playing unnecessary stones, of trying to do too much rather than playing natural or fundamental moves. For Fukuoka, “do nothing” is not an absolutist principle but a lighthearted and casual approach to life.

In some ways, Letters is an attempt to develop a “do nothing” approach to spreading communist ideas.  When we put forward the slogan “Do Nothing!” we do not propose an absolute inverse of the activist demand to “Do Anything!”. Le Garcon Dupont writes:

The refusal to offer solutions, to insist that such must be imposed at a wholly different (and higher) organisational level is the only radical solution we have to offer. People take no notice if you tell them things could be otherwise; if you reveal to them your desire to change things: it instantly turns off a switch in their head. However, if you tell them there is no hope, if you tell them that they can achieve nothing… this provokes their intellectual antibodies, and they start thinking about what they can do.

The do nothing farmer allows nature to solve its own problems, rather than constantly supplying solutions (which, in turn, create new and more difficult problems).  For example, the ‘solution’ of pesticides creates many new problems, whereas allowing natural solutions like spiders does not.

Fukuoka is aware of the contradictions inherent to writing and advocating doing nothing, and he is aware of the limits of communicating his ideas. One of the best sections of the book describes his attendance to a farmers’ co-op meeting, where he argues against the use of fertilizer and urges the other farmers to just scatter the rice straw back onto their fields. He knows that his message cannot be to the co-op (it is financed by the fertilizer industry and etcetera), but in knowing this – and being unattached to the outcome of his intervention – he actually leaves open some space for communicating.

Here I have been, talking all the time about how everything is of no account, saying that humanity is ignorant, that there is nothing to strive for, and that whatever is done is wasted effort. How can I say that and then go on chattering like this? If I push myself to write something, the only thing to write is that writing is useless. It is very perplexing.

The One-Straw Revolution is a beautiful book. It leaves me cautiously optimistic about, at least, my own ability to one day grow vegetables in my backyard by learning how not to do this or that.

Also of interest in this book but beyond the scope of this small review: Fukuoka’s criticisms of Buddhism and organic food ideology.  Another person’s thoughts on the book here.

*Thank you to Bryan A. Gardner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage for reminding me that “Thus itself being an adverb, it needs no ly.”