National Water Center, Eureka Springs, Arkansas
National Water Center, Eureka Springs, AR
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Sosei Water
Hugh Lovel
Here is the first of two parts describing my visit to Japan as a participant in the Sosei Water conference and the water discoveries I learned about there. I wrote this in March but it has taken this long for it to be translated and for Mr. Fukai to read it. I wanted him to read it before I passed it on to the list. Now he has indicated his generous permission for me to share it with anyone.
I was invited to Japan to speak at the first SoSei Water Stewardship Conference just after Thanksgiving at Nagano prefecture, the district of the Olympic Games, in Ueda City. This conference was conjoined with the Fourth SoSei Users Conference in a huge traditional style Japanese Hotel with tatamis, futons, and steamy Japanese bath - the cleanest and most wholesome hotel of all we stayed in.
Fellow speakers included: Patrick Horsbrugh of South Bend, Indiana, founder of the Environic Foundation International; Richard Pinkham of Snowmass, Colorado, senior research associate for the Rocky Mountain Institute; Brad Cummings of Ontario Canada head of the Pollution Prevention and Mining Toxics Prevention Division Ontario Region of the EPA Canada; Professor Doktor Karl Reub of Suderburg, Germany, Director of Poste Graduate Study Programme/Waste Management; Lim Chong Keat of Penang, Malaysia, architect, urban planner and long time student/friend of Buckminster Fuller; Simon Reeves of Aukland, New Zealand, (environmental) Barrister and Solicitor; Callum Coats of Australia, the Schauberger water expert who we've heard so much about on this list, and Errol Samuel of Australia, an environmental consultant involved in design and engineering of environmental construction for the Sidney Olympic Games. Missing and in an anthroposophic hospital in Switzerland was Jennifer Green of Maine (USA), one of the world's leading authorities on water quality. Though she could not come she sent us a rousing, prayerful, written address and a very interesting video presentation demonstrating the Schwenk water quality (drop) testing method.
Until you've experienced Japanese hospitality it is unlikely you could conceive of it. The first outward signs are the "arigato gozaimasu" and little bow as you are greeted, but it goes a lot deeper. Imagine first getting there by plane from Atlanta (16 hours over northern Alaska and down the Kamchatka Peninsula into Narita Airport), then the airport express train and a switch to the Shinkansen (bullet train) for travel (the fastest I've ever gone on land) over the mountains to Nagano to SoSei Headquarters. Up until this point, no one in Japan was rude, but they didn't know us. Callum Coats and I were met at the airport by American and Finnish interpreters and escorted to Nagano. Once at company headquarters, "Arigato gozaimasu! Arigato! Arigato! down the line with grinning handshakes. Soon we were on the way in a company van to President Fukai's house where we got to bathe in very warm Sosei Water in a deep tub with absolutely no soaps, detergents or shampoos. Those of us waiting our turn sat on cushions around a low table talking via interpreters with President Fukai and each other and feasting on a beautiful assortment of rice, sushi and sushimi out of sophisticated individual take-out containers. The beverage? Sosei water.
I figured out my chop sticks (first I had to pull them apart kind of like pulling on a turkey wishbone). I'm 51 years old and have on a few occasions used chop sticks, but I had to really concentrate on it. Those little mouthfuls of nori, rice and bits of vegetables or raw fish (sushi), to say nothing of the bites of raw tuna or squid (sushimi), seemed to taste really good. There's something about Japanese food that seems very clean to me, though the idea of eating all that raw fish doesn't appeal to me outside that setting.
Then it was my turn for the bath. I really needed it. I'd had a long trip by air and another whole trip by rail, and I was tired. Plus I'd had a painful crick in my back near my left shoulder blade ever since the day after my workshop with Peter Proctor at Fair Oaks, California. It was, if anything, brought to the fore by the "comfort" of a 16 hour Delta Air ride, and the other demands of travel such as wakefulness and much carrying of heavy luggage. I sank under the warm water. I was one of the last to bathe, and, no soaps or shampoos? It was the same bath water everyone before me had bathed in. How clean was I going to get in that? Nearly all the others were distance travelers like me. Nevertheless it looked clean and I soaked in it a bit and rubbed myself down from head to toe, immersing my head, scrubbing my hair and everything. I could have soaked all night joyfully. But there were still one or two people waiting, so I climbed out, toweled down and dressed.
Back at the low table with all the cushions it suddenly dawned on me that I not only felt very clean and refreshed, but that pesky crick in my back was gone! Very interesting. Yoshitomo Nakata san was showing off Sosei water by scrubbing the grease off the back of the stove and the wall behind it with nothing more than a scrubbing pad and Sosei water. It seemed to work more or less like "Purple Power" but without the chemical stench or anything. This was the same water we were drinking. Very interesting.
We were given large bottles of Sosei Water for drinking and taken to a very nice motel for the night. By early morning I was down to breakfast, having drunk an enormous amount of bottled Sosei water during the night. It was pretty good. Pretty good. We were whisked to company headquarters by van after breakfast and given a leisurely tour--it was get acquainted time. I think everyone understood that most of us had traveled great distances.
Lunch was a party, and President Fukai gave away some little Japanese jackets with a sash--I don't know what they are called. Very nice though. And always we were encouraged to drink Sosei water. Pretty good water, more invigorating perhaps, though not sweeter than comes from my spring on the farm.
President Fukai addressed us and said he would show us all about the Sosei water treatment process. He asked please not to laugh because the process was really very simple.
Born June 13, 1947 and growing up after the war, his father was in livestock and dairy (seeing one of my pictures of me milking a cow he showed me he'd mastered the art too) and he was in hotels and restaurants. About ten years back his father got cancer and died, and this made him take life more seriously. So he immersed himself in a study of Buddhism and meditation. In the process he received the insights leading to development of the Sosei Water treatment process, which produced H3O2- or anionic water--pure water but water enriched by mono-valent OH- ions. This meant that even though it was so mild in its action that you could drink it, nonetheless it was so powerful a solvent and so effective at freeing up cations that it could take the place of soaps, shampoos, detergents of all kinds, even dry cleaning fluids such as perchlorethylene (aka Perc = the cleaning solvent most used in dry cleaning, a serious chlorofluorohydrocarbon [CFC] threatening polar ozone).
The model we were shown was the household size that was fitted into water mains at the entrances to houses. The unit cost was $16,000 at the exchange rate of 130 yen to 1 dollar, and before installation the user had to sign a contract to use no soaps, detergents, shampoos, conditioners or other chemical cleaners, only Sosei water. All existing detergents were boxed up, removed from the household and treated as toxic waste.
The First Stage of Three
Here were the essential features of the treatment device. As Toshiharu Fukai explained, it was a simple device despite the high level insights that produced it.
There were three chambers or columns. First the water came in and trickled up a column two or three inches in diameter and a couple feet long packed with an ion exchange resin, which looks like tiny, amber beads. Ion exchange resins are just what the name says, tiny resinous beads that remove ions from solution, replacing them with other ions. Such resins are commonly used in water treatment to take positively charged calcareous ions such as calcium, magnesium, strontium, barium, etc. out of water in exchange for sodium. To flush the column and restore it a concentrated salt solution is sent through the resin to drive off the calcarious deposits. We were told this resin was charged or recharged with rock salt.
Here I am a BD farmer, presented with a step that removes the lime from the water. Right away I took interest, only to find the next step involved silica and the final step involved clay. Since biodynamic farmers think of the polarities of lime and silica with clay as the middle ground imagine my interest! Certainly this water process deserved a good look.
Not many people seem to have heard of Dr. Carey Reams' theory of biological ionization. Reams was a self-employed biochemist that 20 some years ago lived about 30 miles away from me near Blue Ridge, Georgia. He taught agricultural classes right up until he died, but he'd also done extensive research into the biochemistry of aging and disease. Dr. Reams found that as people aged they built up a cationic overload. (This is even true of the Earth. Back in its youth there was not so much lime, but as lime was acquired from Solar fusion and solar flares and deposited as sedimentary layers on the Earth cations have built up.) He tested foods to see which ones might alleviate it. The only anionic food in hundreds and hundreds tested turned out to be fresh squeezed lemon juice. Since water commonly had a wide variety of cations in it the only water he found that was essentially cation free was distilled water. So for a while he operated a clinic that supervised fasting on distilled water with a little fresh squeezed lemon juice in it. This went a long ways towards health and the arrest of aging with many people.
Reams was not just someone whose theories I'd merely heard about, he was someone I knew and I'd known some of the people who took his fasting cure. As well I had a lifetime association with a father who fasted rather commonly on water, sometimes with fresh lemon. Most folks know very little about the power of fasting. While in prison I myself fasted ten days to get over pneumonia on one occasion and again fasted for ten days because of internal bleeding from a stomach ulcer when no other medical assistance was forthcoming. Of course on neither occasion did I have distilled water and fresh lemon, so I hadn't experienced a fast with anionic water. But at least I could see there was good reason to believe there was something to Ream's theory.
However, passing water straight from the city water mains through a cation exchange resin would hardly render the water anionic since the ion exchange resin simply substitutes sodium ions for the various other cations in solution.
The Next Step
Of course, there was more than one step to this water treatment process. Mr. Fukai indicated that in his observation of waters of quality, such as mountain springs of renown, he observed that water of highest quality occurred where the water flowed through obsidian--volcanic glass. Nakata-san showed us the inner contents of a second chamber. He pulled a filter sock out of a treatment unit which had been in use. Inside were irregular chunks of obsidian about the size of ping pong balls.
This was interesting. Although the obsidian was wet and gleaming, it did not gleam with the shiny glass brightness of freshly broken obsidian. Rather it had a dull, matte finish that suggested etching. I thought the slight concentration of cationic sodium ions very likely reacted with the obsidian, forming sodium silicates, one of the most soluble salts of silica. Since silica acts as an anion the result might be slightly anionic water. However, from what I know of chemistry--which is a fair bit--it looked to me like any such effects would be slight and would hardly explain the detergent and healthful properties we were hearing about. Neither could I see how it could explain the effects I experienced from the bath.
Step Three
The third and final step in the water treatment process--and Mr. Fukai had apologized that it was so simple--was probably the most interesting of all. This column was made up of sections that screwed into one another. Each was a machined aluminum cylinder in which the water flowed upward through holes in the bottom, such as in a salt shaker. Each section was filled with a mixture of twists of anodized aluminum, a centimeter or slightly more wide and about 4 or 5 centimeters long, a little thicker than cardboard and twisted as if around a pencil. In between these twisted bands of anodized aluminum were pellets about BB size or a little larger which Mr. Fukai said were made from a mixture of clay and ground tourmaline, a gemstone quality aluminum mineral. Moreover, the inside bore of each section was rifled. That is it had a deep groove machined in a spiral up the bore, and the inside of this lip was curled rather like the curvature of a wave near the seashore as it just begins to curl from the crest.
Callum Coats, who may well be the world's leading authority on the properties of living water as well as the means of creating it, was very intrigued by the rifling of the bore and the twists of anodized aluminum. I was equally intrigued by the pellets of clay and ground tourmaline.
As a biodynamic farmer, I'm aware that all life processes take place between the opposite polarities of lime and silica. Clay, whose basis is aluminum, lies in between these polarities and acts as a sink for life forces.
Many folks are aware that food wrapped in aluminum foil rapidly becomes depleted of life forces. However in the soil, with it's covering of organic matter, the aluminum in clay acts as a life energy reservoir, attracting and building up life energy. Biodynamics also places considerable emphasis on form and formative forces, and tourmaline is one of the most highly formed--gemstone quality--aluminum minerals. Between the rifling of the bore and the spiral and bead filler, guaranteed to create maximum form in water flow, and the overall action of the alumina materials this final column conceivably could charge the water passing through with considerable life force.
Throughout the natural world where ever we encounter life force there is oxygen. There is oxygen in lime, oxygen in silica and oxygen in clay. The two polar opposites of lime and silica and their middle ground of clay would not participate in the life processes without oxygen. Sosei Water was hyper oxygenated--to the point it was H3O2 instead of H2O. It was this final chamber, as far as I could determine from just looking, that must be incorporating the extra oxygen into the water, turning it into H2O plus OH-or H3O2 with an anionic charge. Very interesting. I looked forward to more detailed discussion with the inventor, Mr. Fukai, if ever opportunity presented.
[After Toshiharu Fukai read this article he sent me the following information:]
"You can, of course, release all the information you have to anybody. "I will give you some info you MIGHT NOT have here. "The aluminum (anodized) inside the cylinders and the cylinder itself (aluminum) cause an electrode position phenomenon and attract silica that can not be absorbed into the body. That is, silica as solute in water (silica from obsidian, ion exchange resins, and tap water) gets electrically attracted to aluminum (twists of anodized aluminum and aluminum cylinders).
"This electrode position occurs when tourmaline pellets collide with each other generating electricity of 4-14 millivolts, thus letting alumina curls and cylinders take that effect.
"People may not believe it and some might even say that we are some kind of cult people, but the energy of running water in the aluminum cylinders absorbs, from outside the cylinders, cosmic energies and [sic, an unreadable word] (vibrations) of thought, making the water "Sosei Water." That is why Sosei Water is called "vibration water" or "vibration transferred water."
"So by incorporating some thought or even number into the cylinder, you can change the energy of the Sosei Water. On the surface of some alumina twists (bands) is embossed a number or a name of some disease.
"There is a mysterious phenomenon we have here. Silica does not stick to those alumina bands with a number or a disease name embossed, but it does to those without a number or a disease name.
"I think it is a wonderful world." --Toshiharu Fukai
Coming, Part II: A TOUR OF WATER INSTALLATIONS