AIKIDO, VEGANISM AND CREATING PEACE IN THE WORLD
By Claudette Vaughan

The first edition of the vegan Japanese Pocketguide started with a modest 18 veggie restaurants reviewed. The latest edition of the same book today has over 120 veggie reviews in it. Herwin Walravens wrote the Pocketguide. He practices the Japanese martial art Aikido. Aikido was formulated after WW11 to create peace in the world and we are of the opinion that veganism has the same potential. Many aikidoists in the world are also interested in veganism and alternate lifestyles. The Japan Times recently wrote an article ‘Lean, Green and No Hippy Aftertaste’ by Nicholas Coldicott stating that once hard to find, cheap vegan cuisine is now booming in Japan. We speak with Herwin Walravens recently to find out more about aikido, veganising Japan and peace in our time.

Morihei Ueshiba – Founder of Aikido: “The Art of Peace does not rely on weapons or brute force to succeed; instead we put ourselves in tune with the universe, maintain peace in our own realms, nurture life, and prevent death and destruction. The true meaning of the term samurai is one who serves and adheres to the power of love.”

Abolitionist: Vegans are known for their non-violence and avoid violence but doesn’t that leave them defenceless in an aggressive world? What does aikido and veganism have in common? How can we deal with conflicts and violence without using violence ourselves and thus becoming part of the problem?

Herwin Walraven: Just as people choose for a vegan lifestyle because they want to live their life without causing cruelty and death to other living beings, in the same way you can choose for the modern Japanese martial art aikido as a good alternative for defending yourself and dealing with conflicts in daily life without resorting to violence like your opponent and the wish to destroy your opponent in order to "win".

In both veganism as in aikido we don't merely care about ourselves, we don’t want to eat or win at the expense of others, whether that be animals or people, but we try to cultivate more respect for others that we share this world with.

Aikido is great because it is about dealing with conflicts in such a way that both you and the opponent in the end can benefit from it but let there be no mistake, aikido is not a new age kind of lets-be-nice-to-our-enemy-and-sing-a-happy-song kind of thing, it's a respected martial art that can be very effective in practical situations like dealing with aggressive people.

Why did you write the book Japan Vegan Restaurant Pocket Guide?

As a frequent vegetarian traveler to Japan I never put much effort in finding veggie restaurants. I just used to get by, eating in normal restaurants, with the usual surprises like finding seafood in your vegetable soup. When I became vegan though, and dropped veggie options like cheese pizzas, french fries and a milkshake at McDonalds, things did get tougher.

At that time I started getting excited about the good food in Tokyo and the professional attitude of those veggie restaurants I was visiting. While there, I got more information about veggie restaurants and back home I started to do a little research on the internet. Japan, on the internet among western travelers, had a very bad reputation. People were competing with each other to tell how bad it is for veggies in Japan. Common comments were, “In everything there is fish stock”; “I gave up being a veggie in Japan because it’s too difficult.”etc

I figured that many people are not aware of the veggie restaurants in Tokyo, simply because they cannot find them, e.g., because of the language barrier. In short, a little more research, visiting and checking, and I had a list of 18 100% vegetarian restaurants in Tokyo, which I turned into a little simple booklet, and did sell in various shops in Tokyo. It was sold out soon and got positive reactions both from travelers as well as Japanese veggies. On my next visits to Japan, I checked more veggie restaurants, in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, and a year later the second professional pocket guide could be published, this time with around 50 veggie restaurants. And now, for the last year and a half, I am working on the third edition, traveling all around Japan from Okinawa to Sapporo for visiting and checking veggie restaurants for the next Japan Vegan Restaurant Pocket guide that will have more than 120 100% vegetarian/vegan restaurants.

My book is sold in bookshops, so it’s easy available to non veggie people who have an interest in achieving a healthy lifestyle. It is selling well and sometimes I even get some very nice feedback about it, how people enjoyed to visit restaurants in the book. and I am always happy to hear from people who traveled to Japan and email me their veggie experiences, and who visited some of the restaurants. If people can have a positive veggie experience and enjoy, I am happy, it’s great, and that’s what keeps me motivated.

How difficult is it for the Japanese to be vegan?

To become vegan in Japan can be difficult, not for practical reasons such as “food”, but for social reasons. Supermarkets have a great variety of fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, tofu, soymilk, etc, etc. So vegan home cooking cannot be a problem. And snacks like “inari sushi” and “onigiri” are suitable for vegans and can be easily bought in any of the many convenience stores.
And with the recent boom in veggie restaurants, even dining out doesn’t have to be a problem when you live in the bigger cities.

However, Japanese people are extreme sensitive of their social position, and go that extra mile (and sometimes two extra miles) to avoid to be different from the rest of their social circle. Going out with non-veggie friends or co workers can be a real problem. Maybe it’s best to say “I am not hungry, I just eat this salad today”, or even just decide to eat meat “for not being rude.” If you would make a fuzz and take much time asking about ingredients and maybe ask the staff for a veggie request, you would feel impolite, bothering other people, and isolated from the rest, and maybe next time not get invited back.

It doesn’t have to be that way. My vegan friend who lives in a small town, had a job interview for a job at a junior high school, that would include kitchen work. She expressed that she is vegan and doesn’t want to cook or prepare meat and fish. The school accepted this and hired her.

Are there many vegans in Japan?

Thanks to the internet and digital communities it’s easy to find other vegans. In any city I go to, I always can find some vegans who are passionate about not eating meat, not wearing leather and stuff like that. They usually are ordinary looking persons, no hardcore “meat-is-murder” buttons in your face kind of stuff, working at the office or at a school. Besides this, other people that don’t eat meat or animal products are macrobiotic people.

What is the food culture in Japan, are there other food-cultures similar to veganism?

We all know from experience how dominating meat is in our western food culture, and how our most important meal of the day, dinner, is centred around meat, with little culinary space for our underestimated friends the veggies. Still, when I visit a Japanese home and enjoy any meal, so much attention and care is given to the vegetables, the soup, the rice... A home-style meal may have a small fish side dish but it’s just that, a side dish. All dishes are equally enjoyed, and taste just equally great.

Definitely food culture everywhere is changing in these modern times with the onslaught of hamburgers, meat, McDonalds , chubby children, being the norm now but together with this negative change, people are still highly aware about food quality, food safety, and the roots of their own food culture, which is basically a non-meat food culture. Even fish wasn’t that important as a daily food in the old days as we would like to think. Most of the meals were strict vegetarian.

Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the Japanese martial art Aikido, was a person living in that turbulent area of Japan when the traditional Japanese values were challenged by the newly western values of that time. Like many ordinary people he kept to a Japanese diet without any meat consumption. The Omoto sect to which he belonged, also specifically didn’t eat cow and horse meat, “because those animals helped farmers in historical times.”

Still today, in the supermarket there can be displays of the seasonable wild veggies, like bamboo roots in spring, and mushrooms in autumn. In spring people go into the woods and harvest spring veggies. In autumn go to the woods and harvests other natural goodies. Staying in harmony with nature is considered a national part of the Japanese identity, like flower viewing in spring, and eating seasonal food.

Many people are now rediscovering and exploring these traditional Japanese culinary roots, millet and brown rice orientated. The most popular is macrobiotic, which is popular and well known. Some macrobiotics don’t exclude fish, but most do and are strict vegetarian. Macrobiotics has a long history, (the word itself comes form ancient Greece), and was partly developed in Japan by medics who saw food as a medicine that keeps you healthy and away from illness, and cure illness, this view is not restricted to Japan but belongs to general Asian philosophy. In the previous century macrobiotics was developed and made popular as it is now in its present form by various Japanese people.

Japan also has its own traditional vegan cooking, called ‘Temple Cooking.’ Buddhism teaches compassion for all living beings and for this reason Buddhists are supposed not to kill and eat them, the same compassionate reason why we vegans don’t eat animals! Temple Cooking in Japan has two distinct styles: Japanese Shojin Ryori and the Chinese style Fucha Ryori, but if not told, you wouldn’t know the difference.

The real vegan Temple Cooking is mostly restricted to the Buddhist temples mainly in Kyoto, which sometimes have their own restaurant.
The average Tanaka san might be Buddhist just like his counterpart in the west might be Christen, but the chance that he is a vegetarian for Buddhist reason is negotiable. There is however a rather large vegetarian Buddhist community in Japan, consisting from Taiwanese people and other Asian immigrants, which seem to be more serious about their Buddhism than their Japanese counterparts.
There are various vegetarian Taiwan restaurants in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Okinawa.

After macrobiotics became popular, it was the turn for vegetarianism. Stimulated by western vegetarianism, it was again a rediscovery of the own Japanese vegetarian roots, and mainly for health reasons. There are not many lacto ovo vegetarians, most keep a rather strict vegetarian diet, with taking milk and eggs only as a small ingredient in other food products. On the other hand, since vegetarianism is often seen as simply not eating meat (which was very normal in Japan) people can say they are vegetarian just to make clear they don’t eat meat, but fish is okay with them.

The most recent attention for an alternative food lifestyle was focused on veganism. In contrary to macrobiotics who appeals mostly to females, veganism appeals to the younger people, males and females alike. Veganism in Japan doesn’t have the subculture “meat is murder” attitude that it sometimes has in western countries, and doesn’t appeal to the average person. It is more open and more a lifestyle than a subculture.

The latest trend in Japan with veganism is raw cooking and living food, attracting some vegans to become raw vegans, and focusing on a healthy lifestyle.

Why did you become a vegan?

I became vegetarian because of animal cruelty. When I realised milk and eggs and cheese are causing as much animal cruelty as meat, I became vegan.

The flavour of Japanese vegan foods is a cuisine quite apart from the ordinary. What’s your description of it?

Well, since there was never a domination of meat that reduced other food to side dishes, the Japanese cuisine always treated each ingredient whether veggie, mushroom, or rice, as a rightful ingredient in itself, exploring and respecting its original flavour and treating this with much care, simply bringing the best out of each ingredient. A cooking philosophy like that surely will bring out the best.

Is the Japanese alcoholic rice drink Sake vegan?

Most of the time charcoal is used for fining, sometimes gelatin. Many other food products have animal products somewhere in their line of production, depending how and which way you look. Maybe the labels on the canned food are glued with glue from animal bones... and surely insects were violently crushed to death when the grain was harvested...
I might add, this way of reasoning doesn’t make veganism appealing to ordinary people in Japan.

Clear sake is mostly fined with charcoal, but gelatin could be used in the refining process. Unfiltered unrefined sake is the brand name Muroku that I recommend.

Herwin’s website is: http://www.veganjapan.net/index_engl.html
He can be contacted at: herwin1234@hotmail.com