Masanobu Fukuoka

(1913 - 2008)

At the age of twenty-five, Masanobu Fukuoka, while dozing under a tree, had the sudden revelation that “all the concepts to which I had been clinging, the very notion of existence itself, were empty fabrications.” He quit his job in the Plant Inspection Division of the Yokohama Customs Office and returned to his native Shikoku, in southern Japan, to practice what he called “do nothing” farming. He continued to farm and give lectures until a few years before his death in 2008 at the age of ninety-five.