The Best Advertisement for Vegan is Not Being Vegan
The best advertisement for being Vegan is not being Vegan. Please give up being Vegan. OK … let me explain a little. Whilst working for an often awarded and world famous wholefood maker and wholesaler, I met a young worker who was very different from the usual archetypal “vegan”. I’d did not pry. I do [...]
Animal Rights in Japan I
I found it quite astonishing to discovered that the first book about animal rights to be published in Japanese only happened in March, 2005. Incredible when you think the likes of BUAV have been active in the far less civilised British Isles for more than 100 years. Dr. Helmut Kaplan’s animal rights classic “Leichenschmaus” (Funeral [...]
MotherFuck-Foreigners
I have spent 25 years religiously chewing brown sushi rice, eating seaweed and drinking twig tea and miso soup. I have spent years of my life saying how wonderful Japan and Japanese people are. I have even spent months of my life attempting to assuage furious Korean nationalists covering the internet with their propaganda, and [...]
Natural Born Vegan Killers
I heard from a friend, who is currently studying natural farming in Wakayama, that his fields were trashed by the local louts. In his case, not teenagers from the local housing project as one might expect in the West, but a troop of macaque monkeys coming down from the mountains in search of food. As [...]
An International Approach to Promoting Veganism
What is the ‘cost’ of a vegan? How much does it cost ‘make’ a vegan? How much does it cost to make society ‘more’ vegan? Who is the benefit for; the animals, the environment, the individual … society or the Vegan Society itself? If the purpose is to ‘make’ as many vegans as possible, or [...]
Woolly Bully: Vegan Material
A young vegan friend who is a tailor and a fashion designer wrote to me to asked a honest question about cloth … fabrics … materials. It not only made me look again at my beliefs but it inspired me to research the subject more. According to the Memorandum of Association of the Vegan Society [...]
Wanted Vegans: Dead, Alive or Recycled
One of the great divides in the Vegan World is that between Raw and Cooked. ‘Dead’ or ‘alive’ foods, as the former would call it. More specifically, Vegan Raw Fooders* (Fruitarians) versus Vegan Macrobiotics. An as aside, I will also talk Freegan. The history of macrobiotics and the raw food movement have been much discussed [...]
More Vegan Enlightenment
Eating fish & animals just because you like to, or it is easy & convenient, is not Buddhist. “Whatever your conception is of perfection is, it is wrong. Throw away that image and keep improving your life. What we think is real, and right, is only an impermanent illusion.” The sages of old went on [...]
Itadakimasu … いただきます
“Being vegan is the one of the most profound, far reaching, easiest and enjoyable ‘itadakimasu’ in the world. There is no better way to offer your thanks and gratitude towards any living being … by not killing it and eating it.” Meals in Japan traditionally begin with the hands in prayer position and the phrase [...]
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