Shokuyō: Sagen Ishizuka's Food Cure

Table of Contents

1. What Shokuyō Means
2. Food Is the Root: Shokuhon-shugi
3. The Five Doctrines of Shokuyō
4. Diagnosis by Looking, Prescriptions of Food
5. Food Fitted to Each Way of Life: The Ten Points
6. The Foods He Favoured
7. The Foods He Warned Against
8. Eat Where You Live, Eat in Season
9. The Books of 1896 and 1898
10. Daily Practice as His Followers Recorded It
11. The Shokuyō-kai Spreads the Food Cure
12. Key Research Papers
13. Connections
14. Featured Videos

1. What Shokuyō Means

The word 食養 is made of two characters: 食 (shoku), food or eating, and 養 (yō), to nourish, rear or cultivate. Namimatsu notes that 養 is said to have the original sense of “offering food”, and that the word shokuyō itself came from China but had grown its own meaning inside Japan’s 養生 (yōjō) tradition, the Edo-period literature on preserving health and reaching old age through daily habits of eating, sleeping, breathing, bathing and keeping a calm mind. Fujii suggests that Ishizuka used shokuyō and shokuyō-hō (食養法, “the food-cure method”) as a short form of 食物養生法 (shokumotsu yōjōhō), “the method of nourishing life through food”, which is the main title of his 1898 book.

Ishizuka did not mean a diet for the sick alone. In his usage shokuyō was the right way of eating for everyone at every stage of life, and 食育 (shokuiku, food education) was the part of it that concerned the growing child. Fujii concludes that the phrase 食育食養法 (“food-education and food-cure method”), which Ishizuka used himself, covers his intention exactly: food education for children in the years of growth, and the food cure for adults after it. The story of that second word is told on Shokuiku: How Sagen Ishizuka Coined “Food Education”.

The phrase “food cure” also fits the way his patients met it. A 1907 society founded to spread his method took the name 化学的食養会 (Kagakuteki Shokuyō-kai, “Chemical Food Cure Society”), and the word “chemical” was his own: both of his main books carry it in their titles, because he believed he had found in the mineral salts of food a chemical explanation for the old Japanese and Chinese wisdom about diet.

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2. Food Is the Root: Shokuhon-shugi

At the base of everything Ishizuka taught lies the principle that Japanese writers call 食本主義 (shokuhon-shugi), “the doctrine that food is the root”. The first page of the enlarged seventh edition of his popular book (1909) states it in one line:

「食は本なり、体は末なり、心はまたその末なり」 — “Food is the root; the body is the branch; and the mind is the branch of that.”

Namimatsu quotes a second formulation: food is “the visible cause of the mind”, and the mind is “the invisible result of food” (「食は心の有形的原因にして、心は食の無形的結果」). In the 1898 book Ishizuka drew the practical consequence: to make the mind clean one must make the blood clean, and to make the blood clean one must make the food clean. From this he concluded that the causes of illness of both body and mind lie in food.

He put the same idea in terms of balance. The introduction (緒論) of his 1896 book opens with a line that Fujii quotes: 「物平を得ざれば則ち鳴る、食平を得ざれば則ち病む」 — “When things lose their balance they cry out; when food loses its balance, one falls ill.” Elsewhere in the same book he wrote that disease follows when food fails to keep its balance. Fujii explains that this is the pathology of kanpō (traditional Chinese-derived medicine), which Ishizuka had grown up with as the son of a kanpō physician: illness, he wrote, is nothing other than the body nursing an “inner trouble” (内憂) that then invites an “outer affliction” (外患). In his view even the epidemic diseases took hold in this way, when a long imbalance of salts in the diet had first weakened the body’s own power of healing and the cold and damp of the season then struck it.

He also linked shokuyō to the healing power of nature. In the 1896 book, Fujii reports, he wrote that correcting the imbalance of potassium and sodium salts through food agrees with the maxim of Hippocrates that the cure of disease lies in assisting the natural powers of the body. The Japanese summary of the 1896 book’s preface, as later given by his follower Hayashi Jin’ichirō, puts it simply: 「食よく人を養うも、またよく病を医す」, “food nourishes people well, and it also heals sickness well.”

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3. The Five Doctrines of Shokuyō

Ishizuka did not number his teachings himself. The historian Namimatsu Nobuhisa, in his 2015 study of food-cure theory in modern Japan, sorts the content of Ishizuka’s shokuyō into five headings, all resting on the premise that food is the root:

1. 食物至上論 (shokumotsu shijō-ron, “the supremacy of food”). Eating concerns not only the body but the cultivation of the mind. Restraining desire and the pursuit of pleasure at the table builds virtue; food by its nature has the power to change the state of the mind; and the causes of illness of body and mind lie in food.
2. 穀食動物論 (kokushoku dōbutsu-ron, “humans are grain-eating animals”). Human teeth are mainly molars, which shows that eating grain is the natural way for the human body. If one can eat brown rice, that alone is enough; if that is difficult, eat in the proportion of seven parts rice to three parts side dishes (飯7割、副食物3割).
3. 身土不二論 (shindo fuji-ron, “body and land are not two”). Each person should eat the food suited to the land where he or she lives. The Japanese should not imitate European habits but should keep rice at the centre of the diet as their ancestors did, rather than eating large amounts of wheat or barley or making meat the important food.
4. 一物全体食論 (ichibutsu zentai-shoku-ron, “eat the whole food”). Rice is better eaten as brown rice, and other foods too are better eaten whole.
5. 陰陽和合論 (in’yō wagō-ron, “the harmony of yin and yang”). One must know the yin and yang of foods and combine them so that they harmonise, taking into account each person’s circumstances and the climate and land. For Ishizuka the yin and yang of a meal are fixed by its content of “natron” (sodium) salts and “kali” (potassium) salts.

Namimatsu adds an important point about names. The labels 身土不二 and 一物全体 for the third and fourth doctrines are the names that the later Shokuyō-kai movement gave to these ideas; they are not Ishizuka’s own words (see section 8). He also observes that the first four doctrines carry on the Edo-period yōjō tradition, while the fifth is Ishizuka’s own: he took the old yin and yang and gave it a chemical content.

The fifth doctrine is the core of his theory and has its own page, The Husband-and-Wife Alkali Theory: Sodium and Potassium in Food. The second and fourth are told on Humans as Grain Eaters: Ishizuka on Teeth, Brown Rice and Whole Foods. In brief: he taught that sodium-rich foods (salt, meat, eggs, fish and other animal foods) are yang and potassium-rich foods (vegetables, fruit and other plant foods) are yin, that the two salts are opposite yet complementary “like husband and wife”, and that polished white rice, poor in potassium, eaten with salty side dishes tips the balance toward illness.

Fukui City, his birthplace, teaches the same system to the public today as “six teachings of food” (食の6つの訓え): food education is home education; life lies in food; humans are grain eaters; eat foods whole; eat what is fresh and in season where you live; and eat a balanced diet without bias (平衡). These are a modern summary, not Ishizuka’s own list.

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4. Diagnosis by Looking, Prescriptions of Food

From the late 1890s Ishizuka received patients at his home in Ichigaya, Tokyo, in a practice Fukui Prefecture names 石塚食療所 (Ishizuka Shokuryōjo, the Ishizuka Food-Treatment Clinic). Fukui Prefecture describes his method in two steps. He examined each patient by 望診法 (bōshin-hō), his own method of diagnosis by looking, and he treated them by instruction in diet (食指導). It adds the sentence that sums up his practice: a doctor’s prescription normally carries the names of drugs, but Sagen’s prescriptions set out the content of meals and the way to eat them. For that reason his patients called him 食医 (shokui), “the food doctor”, and many came to him every day.

Fujii, following the 1928 biography by his disciple Sakurazawa Yukikazu, adds that so many people came that he limited consultations to a hundred a day and made house calls afterwards, that he charged no fee and gave no medicine, and that each patient received careful dietary instructions of his or her own.

His writing shows what he was looking for when he looked. He warned in the 1896 book, Fujii reports, that one should not judge a person’s health simply from how plump the body is or how glossy the complexion, nor predict length of life from a passing show of physical strength; such judgements lacked, in his word, the “abstract” view of what sustains the body inside. He set beside ordinary outward observation what he called the inner, invisible result of chemistry: the balance of potassium and sodium salts in what the person ate. A prescription therefore weighed the patient’s food as a whole, not one nutrient.

He drew the comparison with medicine himself. Fujii explains that Ishizuka set against the Western pattern of “one disease, one ingredient” the kanpō pattern, in which a principal herb is supported by others in a compound prescription, and argued that food likewise had to be a combination of yin and yang ingredients. He held that the physiologists of his day, who built nutrition on protein, fat and starch alone (he called these the “yang nutrients”), were making the same mistake as one-ingredient pharmacy, and that a person must also take the “yin” non-combustible mineral salts.

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5. Food Fitted to Each Way of Life: The Ten Points

A food prescription, in Ishizuka’s system, was never the same for everyone. Namimatsu reports that in his teaching the right proportion of the two salts is not fixed but differs with a person’s status, race, age and occupation, and with climate and weather, and that each has its own way of cooking. In the 1896 book, Fujii reports, he wrote that the kinds and amounts of food must be adapted to the lie of the land, the weather of the four seasons, the constitution of the old and young, strong and weak, and the kind of work a person does.

At the end of the 1898 book he set out his practical summary, 「職務行務に適當す可き食養法の概旨十項」, “ten points on the food cure suited to each person’s duties and work”. Fujii paraphrases them in modern Japanese; in outline:

1. City manual labourers, who already eat a white-rice staple with meat, fish and fowl and strongly salted plant foods as side dishes, should take low-salt foods between meals, such as rice cakes, yams and potatoes, dumplings and fruit.
2. Sedentary workers, who need little physical strength or quickness, should eat many lightly salted plant side dishes, and keep fish, fowl, meat and eggs as small and as infrequent as possible, even when they eat them as fine food.
3. People whose work needs a sharp talent for business or society may eat rich, fatty food somewhat more than others, but must follow it with ginger, daikon, pepper or mustard paste, and should hold back on potassium-poor sweets between meals, such as castella sponge cake and firm bean-paste jelly (neri-yōkan).
4. Children of school age, who are building knowledge and growing, and adults whose work calls for long, deep thought, should keep to grains and vegetables and not eat indiscriminately of everything.
5. Those who want quick talent and strength so as to be fit for office early should eat widely of all foods, with comparatively less grain and vegetable.
6. A mother who wants a child that grows tall, handsome, calm and healthy should, from pregnancy through the time after birth, eat much grain and vegetable food with little human processing, and less of potassium-poor confections, strongly salted foods, and fish, fowl, meat and eggs.
7. From primary to middle school, children should eat more than adults of the potassium-rich, low-sodium grains, vegetables and fruit, to develop the power of thought and patience.
8. From middle school to the end of university, besides grains, vegetables and fruit, young people should take fish, fowl, meat and strongly salted foods from time to time as side dishes, more as they approach working life, but must never forget that they are by nature grain-eating animals.
9. From the prime of life into old age, when wisdom and long life are the main concern, the classical saying of Mencius that one needs meat at seventy should be adapted to Japan’s land and weather, especially for people living in low, damp places near the sea: they should eat mainly grains, such as rice mixed with barley or adzuki beans and zōni (rice-cake soup) made with miso, keep side dishes few, and when they do eat meat or eggs, cook them soft together with vegetables and not eat much.
10. Monks devoted to virtue and young women who keep to modesty need no great quickness of wit, and should eat mainly grains and vegetables with light salt.

Fujii points out that the ten points look at work from three angles: the physical demands of a job (points 1–2), the stage of life (points 6–9) and the kind of mental ability a person must use (points 3–5 and 10). Behind them lies Ishizuka’s theory of 智 (chi, knowledge and wisdom) and 才 (sai, quick talent): he taught that potassium-rich food fosters wisdom, patience and perseverance, and sodium-rich food fosters quick talent and strength, and that 「智は本にして才は末なり」, “wisdom is the root and talent the branch”. Children should therefore eat more potassium-rich food and move gradually toward more sodium as they grow, always keeping the middle way (中庸).

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6. The Foods He Favoured

Namimatsu summarises the foods Ishizuka recommended in one sentence: hold to Japanese food, keep side dishes in check, and guard against the harm of white rice. Within that frame, his writings and the summaries of them name these foods:

• Brown rice (玄米 genmai) as the staple. The 1909 edition of his popular book recommends it, and Namimatsu’s summary says that if one can eat brown rice, that alone is enough. He wrote in 1896 that rice “by nature is not something to be polished” (米穀は本来搗白すべきものに非ず). In his salt theory brown rice sits between the sodium-rich animal foods and the potassium-rich plant foods.
• Grains in general, as the main part of the meal: seven parts grain to three parts side dishes. For older people near the sea he named rice mixed with barley or adzuki beans and miso zōni.
• Vegetables and other plant foods (蔬菜), the potassium-rich side of the diet, which he wanted children, sedentary workers and thinkers in particular to eat plentifully. He taught that potassium-rich vegetables let the blood take up oxygen fully and keep the body’s renewal vigorous.
• Fruit, among the low-salt foods he advised between meals for labourers and among the potassium-rich foods for schoolchildren.
• Pungent roots and spices after rich food: ginger, daikon (the Japanese white radish), pepper and mustard paste. One of his nicknames, 大根医師 (daikon ishi, “Dr. Daikon”), is recorded by Fujii from Sakurazawa’s biography.
• The food of one’s own land and season, which section 8 explains.

He was not a strict vegetarian. In a passage cited from the 2004 modern-Japanese translation of the 1898 book, he allowed that Zen monks and Western vegetarians could enjoy health and long life without animal food, but his general teaching was a grain-centred diet kept in balance, with animal foods as a small side dish whose amount depended on age, work and place.

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7. The Foods He Warned Against

• Polished white rice (白米). Japanese Wikipedia, citing the 1909 edition, gives his view in the phrase “white rice is the dregs” (白い米は粕である). In 1896 he wrote that stripping away the salts held in the outer layers of the grain, to make a very white rice whose sugars ants love, went against the intention of nature. He held that a staple low in potassium, eaten with sodium-heavy side dishes, upsets the balance and causes illness, and he put beriberi down to the same cause.
• Too much meat, fish, fowl and eggs, and strongly salted foods. These were the sodium side of his scale. He did not forbid them but wanted them small and occasional for most people, cooked with vegetables, and kept low for children and pregnant mothers.
• The imported Western diet. Fujii notes that he argued that in a warm country of much sea and little land such as Japan, meat-eating on the European pattern was not needed, and that Japanese who unknowingly took little potassium and much sodium would end up, in his phrase, as “talented, sickly and short-lived”. Namimatsu reports his complaint that the Japanese had taken to white rice and then, copying the West, to meat, so that quick talent had outgrown wisdom.
• Potassium-poor sweets: castella sponge cake, firm bean-paste jelly, steamed confections and shiruko (sweet bean soup), which the ten points ask most people to cut down.
• Food chosen for taste and looks. Namimatsu writes that for Ishizuka it was not food drawn by fine flavour and fine appearance (美味美観) but food with an inner purity that makes a person truly healthy, and that restraint of appetite was part of the ideal.

His follower Hayashi Jin’ichirō, in his summary of Ishizuka’s preface, extends the “whole food” rule to a list of partial foods: eating only a part, as with sashimi, peeled foods, white rice, refined wheat flour and sugar, makes a person sickly and weak. That list is Hayashi’s wording of the teaching as reported in Japanese Wikipedia’s article on the Shokuyō-kai, not a quotation from Ishizuka.

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8. Eat Where You Live, Eat in Season

Ishizuka’s own name for his rule of local eating was 入郷従郷 (nyūgō jūgō), from the proverb 「郷に入れば郷に従え」, “when you enter a village, follow its ways” — the Japanese equivalent of “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”. In the 1898 book he taught that one should eat the food suited to the land where one lives: make the main produce of the place the staple and its by-products the side dishes, so that body and mind are in harmony with the surroundings. Fukui City quotes his advice that one “should practise a food cure that follows the ways of the village one enters”, and paraphrases his warning that a people’s traditional eating habits should not be changed lightly, since the food handed down in each region has its own meaning.

He wrote some of this as verse. Fujii notes that the 1898 book closes its sections with 道歌 (dōka, short didactic poems), and quotes one:

「島国の魚と鹽とに富む土地は山や畠に生ふる物食へ 大陸の麥と薯とに育つ人つとめて食らへ肉や玉子を」 — “In island lands rich in fish and salt, eat what grows on the hills and in the fields; you who are raised on the wheat and potatoes of a continent, take care to eat meat and eggs.”

The verse states his logic. An island people already surrounded by salt and fish needs the potassium of plants to balance it; a continental people living on grain and tubers needs the sodium of animal food. Each must balance the land it lives on.

Seasonal eating was part of the same rule. Fukui City quotes his verse on the four seasons: 「春苦味、夏は酢の物、秋は辛味、冬は脂肪と合点して食え」, “In spring, bitter; in summer, vinegared dishes; in autumn, pungent; in winter, fat: understand this and eat.” In the 1896 book, Fujii reports, he wrote that the food that sustains human life comes from the yin and yang of all that nature produces, and urged readers to keep to the middle way in eating as the four seasons change.

Two terms often attached to this rule belong to his followers, not to him. 身土不二 (shindo fuji, “body and soil are not two”) is a Buddhist phrase that Nishibata Manabu, a Shokuyō-kai director and army cavalry colonel, adopted for the movement in about 1912, after Ishizuka’s death; Fukui City says that his disciples “seem to have used” the word to pass on his teaching. Fujii suggests that Ishizuka’s own nuance was closer to “body and food are not two” (身食不二). In the same way 一物全体 (ichibutsu zentai, “one thing, whole”) is the name his followers gave to his idea of eating foods whole. How these terms passed into macrobiotics is told on From Shokuyō to Macrobiotics: Ishizuka’s Disciples and Legacy.

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9. The Books of 1896 and 1898

Ishizuka first stated his doctrine in a series of papers in 藥學雜誌 (Yakugaku Zasshi), the journal of the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan, in 1894–95 (listed under Key Research Papers). He then set it out in two books, a scholarly one and a popular one.

Kagakuteki Shokuyō Chōjuron (1896)

『化学的食養長寿論』 (Kagakuteki Shokuyō Chōjuron, “A Chemical Theory of Food-Cure for Long Life”) appeared in June 1896 in a small, largely self-funded printing. It opens with the statement 「人類は穀食（粒食）動物なり」, “humankind is a grain-eating (grain-particle-eating) animal”, and builds from there. Fujii reports Ishizuka’s stated purpose: he had reasoned chemically that the growth of the Japanese body was an artificial result of too little potassium salt and too much sodium salt in food, and he published the book to improve the physical development of the Japanese people.

The book is learned in style. Fujii notes that it quotes passages in English, German and classical Chinese, and that Ishizuka coined many new compound words, often in pairs, such as 海多陸少 and 海少陸多 (“much sea, little land” and the reverse), to describe countries. One passage reads 「蓋し人は一個の小天地陰陽の妙用なり」, “man is a small cosmos, a wondrous working of yin and yang”, and he added his own English: “Men are one microcosm, and natural action of active and passive principles.” The book also contains his advice on 自然的躰操, “natural exercise”: outdoor excursions, lively games, hunting, swimming and boat races, done as the spirit desires, which he held did far more for mind and body than mechanical drill. On page 276 is his sentence that physical, intellectual and ability education “are, in truth, food education”.

Tsūzoku Shokumotsu Yōjōhō (1898)

『通俗食物養生法』 (Tsūzoku Shokumotsu Yōjōhō, “A Popular Guide to Food for Health”), with the alternative title 『化学的食養体心論』 (“A Chemical Food-Cure Theory of Body and Mind”), came out in January 1898 as the readable version of the 1896 book. Fujii records that it went through twenty-odd editions by the end of 1926, and an enlarged seventh edition appeared in December 1909, shortly after his death.

In its introduction Ishizuka describes it as an easy chemical explanation of the causes and effects that allow one to say that physical, intellectual and ability education are food education, and as a practical guide to food education and the food cure that the people of a warm island nation in the East should begin at once, starting with how they combine their dishes. Its aim, he wrote, was to help readers understand how much of the vegetable and animal foods they ate every day was good or harmful.

The book is built for use. Sections end with a verse that sums them up, like the island-and-continent poem in section 8. At the end of the whole book stand the “ten points” on food for each way of life (section 5) and twelve verses on the chemical food cure, eleven of them his own and one by the medieval poet-priest Jien (慈鎮和尚). Fujii comments that these were placed there to make it easy for readers to put the food cure into practice. A modern-Japanese translation was published in 2004.

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10. Daily Practice as His Followers Recorded It

Most of what is known about how shokuyō was lived day to day comes from Ishizuka’s followers rather than from his own pages. Their records agree on a simple pattern.

• A grain-centred bowl. Hayashi Jin’ichirō’s summary, as given in Japanese Wikipedia, says that human food is mainly grain, eaten without going too far toward either plant or meat food, with brown rice standing in the middle between the sodium-rich animal foods and the potassium-rich plant foods.
• Local and seasonal produce. The same summary says to eat what the land produces in its season.
• Whole foods. Since a living thing is in harmony as a whole, eat it whole, rather than parts such as white rice, refined flour or sugar.
• Suspicion of the fashionable Western diet. Hayashi’s summary contrasts this with “Westernised” professors of the Meiji era who spoke as if meat, butter, milk and eggs alone were nourishment.
• Food instead of medicine. Sakurazawa’s biography, as followed by Fujii, records that Ishizuka gave no medicine and charged no fee, only a dietary instruction for each patient.

Followers also recorded what the method had done for them. Sakurazawa Yukikazu, later known in the West as George Ohsawa, had pulmonary and intestinal tuberculosis as a student in Kyoto and, by his own account, recovered on the Ishizuka food-cure method; Namimatsu says this was how he came to Ishizuka’s teaching. Hayashi wrote that he had recovered on Ishizuka’s brown-rice diet from a serious bowel illness that hospital treatment had not cured, and went on to become a physician. The writer Hiratsuka Raichō, in a 1952 essay, said that in her mid-thirties she had suffered headaches and vomiting that no doctor could relieve, read Ishizuka’s food cure and Futaki Kenzō’s writings on brown rice, saw her mistake in diet, and had kept to the practice for almost thirty years.

These are the followers’ own accounts. Later research has studied the traditional Japanese diet that Ishizuka defended — rice-based meals with vegetables, soy foods, fish and seaweed — as a dietary pattern in its own right; large Japanese cohort studies such as the JPHC study and NIPPON DATA80 have examined adherence to it in relation to death from all causes and from cardiovascular disease (see Key Research Papers).

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11. The Shokuyō-kai Spreads the Food Cure

Groups formed around Ishizuka’s method even before he left the army. Around 1892 a food-cure group called the 双塩会 (Sōen-kai, “Double Salt Society”) existed in Osaka, and in 1905 the 帝国食育会 (Teikoku Shokuiku-kai, Imperial Food Education Society) was formed to spread his food cure; it had about three hundred members and had stopped its activity by 1907.

In 1907 the 食養会 (Shokuyō-kai, Food Cure Society) was founded around Ishizuka and his teaching, first under the name Chemical Food Cure Society. Japanese Wikipedia, citing Hayashi’s history, says it was founded because the number of his supporters and of people who had regained their health had grown, and that its founders included army men and figures from politics and business; the Home Ministry also wished it to be set up. The sources differ on his own role: Japanese Wikipedia lists him as first president, while Fujii, following a later study, calls him its adviser. Its monthly 『食養雑誌』 (Shokuyō Zasshi, “Food Cure Magazine”) began on November 10, 1907.

Ishizuka died on October 17, 1909, but the society carried on. Namimatsu records that afterwards it spread the food cure from its base at the 正食庵 in Azabu, Tokyo, and a business office in Kamata, by publishing its magazine and books, giving guidance in hospitals and clinics, and selling food-cure products. It became an incorporated association in 1918. Under Sakurazawa, who rose to lead it in the late 1920s and 1930s, it grew more popular than ever: it built a four-storey hall in Tamura-chō, Tokyo, and its monthly reached about ten thousand subscribers. Its hospital was directed from 1937 by Hayashi Jin’ichirō. Around 1942–43 it was merged into a wartime national food association, and its magazine changed its name and left the food cure behind.

The teaching survived in other hands. Hayashi revived Shokuyō Zasshi in 1953 and presided over both the Shokuyō-kai and the 日本綜合医学会 (Nihon Sōgō Igakkai, Japan Society of Comprehensive Medicine), founded in 1954 by the brown-rice advocate Futaki Kenzō, which carries on brown-rice food cure in Ishizuka’s line. Sakurazawa, after leaving the society around 1940, recast Ishizuka’s sodium–potassium balance as a universal principle of yin and yang and carried it abroad as macrobiotics. The story of those disciples is told on From Shokuyō to Macrobiotics, and Ishizuka’s own life on Sagen Ishizuka: Life and Career.

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Key Research Papers

1. Ishizuka S. 人類ハ穀食動物ナリ [Humankind is a grain-eating animal]. Yakugaku Zasshi. 1894;(148):532-8. — DOI: 10.1248/yakushi1881.1894.148_532
2. Ishizuka S. 飲食品化學的鹽類論 [A chemical theory of the salts in food and drink]. Yakugaku Zasshi. 1894;(149):650-67. — DOI: 10.1248/yakushi1881.1894.149_650
3. Ishizuka S. 飲食品化學的鹽類論（續キ） [A chemical theory of the salts in food and drink, continued]. Yakugaku Zasshi. 1894;(151):886-901. — DOI: 10.1248/yakushi1881.1894.151_886
4. Ishizuka S. 食物中ノ加里鹽ハ酸素吸収ノ媒介者ナリ [Potassium salt in food is the mediator of oxygen absorption]. Yakugaku Zasshi. 1895;(153):1066-73. — DOI: 10.1248/yakushi1881.1895.153_1066
5. Ishizuka S. 第三章 食物中夫婦亞兒加里ノ性質論 [On the properties of the husband-and-wife alkalis in food]. Yakugaku Zasshi. 1895;(155):48-58. — DOI: 10.1248/yakushi1881.1895.155_48
6. Ishizuka S. 第四章 入浴ハ亦人體ノ脱鹽法ナリ [Bathing, too, is a way of desalting the human body]. Yakugaku Zasshi. 1895;(156):150-9. — DOI: 10.1248/yakushi1881.1895.156_150
7. 山本妃奈子. 石塚左玄の「食養道」における栄養教育的意義：健康食の思想と栄養教育との関連から [The significance for nutrition education of Ishizuka Sagen’s way of food cure]. Hiroshima Bunkyo Daigaku Kiyo. 2025;60:34-47. — DOI: 10.51095/kiyo.60.04
8. 宝蔵もと子. 胚芽米・七分搗き米・玄米論争をめぐる系譜 [The genealogy of the germ-rice, 70%-milled rice and brown-rice debate]. Nihon Kaseigakkai Kenkyu Happyo Yoshishu. 2017;69:25. — DOI: 10.11428/kasei.69.0_25
9. 近藤みゆき. マクロビオティックについて [A study on macrobiotics]. Nagoya Bunri Tanki Daigaku Kiyo. 2001;26:45-52. — DOI: 10.24609/nbukiyout.26.0_45
10. 黒田純一郎. 代替的な食の文化の現代的展開：マクロビオティックを中心に [Alternative diets in modern society: the case of macrobiotics]. Shukyo Kenkyu. 2015;88(Suppl):467-8. — DOI: 10.20716/rsjars.88.Suppl_467
11. Sasaki S, for Working Group 1 of the Healthy Diet Research Committee of International Life Sciences Institute, Japan. What is the scientific definition of the Japanese diet from the viewpoint of nutrition and health? Nutr Rev. 2020;78(Suppl 2):18-26. — PubMed PMID: 33259625
12. Matsuyama S, Sawada N, Tomata Y, Zhang S, Goto A, Yamaji T, et al. Association between adherence to the Japanese diet and all-cause and cause-specific mortality: the Japan Public Health Center-based Prospective Study. Eur J Nutr. 2021;60:1327-36. — PubMed PMID: 32676701
13. Nakamura Y, Ueshima H, Okamura T, Kadowaki T, Hayakawa T, Kita Y, et al. A Japanese diet and 19-year mortality: national integrated project for prospective observation of non-communicable diseases and its trends in the aged, 1980. Br J Nutr. 2009;101:1696-705. — PubMed PMID: 19021919
14. Tsugane S, Sawada N. The JPHC study: design and some findings on the typical Japanese diet. Jpn J Clin Oncol. 2014;44:777-82. — PubMed PMID: 25104790

PubMed Topic Searches

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=macrobiotic+diet
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=sodium+potassium+ratio+Japan
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=brown+rice+white+rice+health
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=shokuiku

Further Reading

• 藤井義博. 石塚左玄の食育食養法：栄養療法の知的枠組についての研究11 [Ishizuka Sagen’s food-education and food-cure method]. Bulletin of the Faculty of Human Life Sciences, Fuji Women’s University. 2014;51:25-38. — Repository record
• 並松信久. 近代日本における食養論の展開 [The development of food-cure theory in modern Japan]. Bulletin of the Institute of Japanese Culture, Kyoto Sangyo University. 2015;20. — Handle: 10965/1239
• Fukui City. 石塚左玄の紹介 [Introducing Ishizuka Sagen]. — city.fukui.lg.jp
• Fukui Prefecture. 福井の幕末明治歴史秘話 47: 「食医」と呼ばれた食育の祖、石塚左玄 [Stories of late-Edo and Meiji Fukui, no. 47]. — pref.fukui.lg.jp (PDF)
• Japanese Wikipedia. 石塚左玄 and 食養会.

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Connections

• Sagen Ishizuka: Founder of Shokuyō
• Sagen Ishizuka: Life and Career
• The Husband-and-Wife Alkali Theory
• Grain Eating and Brown Rice
• Shokuiku: Food Education
• From Shokuyō to Macrobiotics
• Brown Rice
• White Rice
• Fermented Foods
• Ginger
• Sodium
• Potassium
• Nutrition and Orthomolecular Medicine

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