By Bill Neall    

Herman Aihara had many feelings about many things. Some were unspoken as was the Japanese custom, but those he shared were voluminous. The following are expressions of some of these feelings over the last fifteen or so years, respectively included as his side of the story of looking back on his life.

"Disciplining physical unfreedom is the foundation of spiritual freedom. God didn't give us unlimited biological freedom, but appreciating and taking into consideration our unfree physical condition leads us to greater freedom, both physically and spiritually." (Macromuse, Spring 1985)

"The condition of no exclusivity is a state of mind with which one understands and lives Oneness or Totality...Exclusivity is one of the natural manifestations of ego. As long as we have an ego, we live with some exclusivity. Therefore, there are always wars, hatred, separation and antagonism among all human life."(Macromuse, Summer 1984)

"Ohsawa's medicine was to live with no exclusivity - to accept even sickness, bacteria, pains and tumors. Ohsawa's medicine is not to eliminate bacteria, viruses, or tumors, but to make them your friends, your benefactors...Today, wars and antagonism cover (the) face of the earth. The cause of this lies in the fact that there is no real leader in today's world society, whether political or spiritual." (Macromuse, Summer 1984)

"My job is listening to complaints...To me, you are the teacher and I am the student. That is the way it works in Vega. Vega is where the students come and pay money and do the teaching. And the staff is learning. It used to be that the students were the only staff....At Vega you are learning basically yourselves." (Talking to students about Vega)

"Usually death is physiological. The kidneys become weak and more acidic which stops metabolism. Glucose can't be turned into energy. At this point the body knows it's going to die. The heart weakens and slows down. The oxygen supply slows down and the brain stops functioning. We give up. This we call death. If the heart is strong we can come back. Sometimes you come back." (Talking to students at Vega)

Herman had faced death at least four times over the years. Once, in a bathroom in Japan the heater for the bathtub was leaking gas and he was knocked unconscious. When he fell down, he hit the wall and his parents heard it and came and rescued him. Once, when he was mountain climbing, he fell twenty feet in two seconds, but was caught by an overhang. In these two seconds he saw his whole life flash before him. Because it happened so fast, there was no time for fear or pain. He calls this the borderline. When you come to it you either cross it or don't. People who have previously died, like loved ones, invite you to cross it. If you refuse, you come back.

"The spirit never dies. You come back or repeat again and again, not in a physical body, a plant, or an animal, but something entirely different."(Talking to students at Vega)

"Spiritual thinking understands God, or Infinity, Unconditional Love, Faith, Truth, Courage, Health, and Happiness. ...the place from which one can understand both the physical world and the spiritual world at the same time is the narrow gate of heaven.

This came to me while I was in the water. When I gave up all emotion and accepted whatever God's decision was for me, I reached the balancing point and I began floating toward the shore naturally. If I had continued to struggle I would have lost.

When we reach this balancing point we lose all emotion. We reach the point where we love everything and everyone, hate changes to love, enemy changes to friend, sickness changes to health, unhappiness changes to happiness. In other works, we reach God's judgment or what Ohsawa called supreme judgment. Reaching this point is the goal of macrobiotics. Reaching supreme judgment is possible when we eat natural foods such as whole grains, fresh vegetables, and sea vegetables as our main food. Foods that are chemicalized, synthetic, or altered by processing are not balanced. If we eat these foods, we may lose the ability to see God's wisdom, plan, memory, and goal. This is the cause of our sicknesses, bad emotions, and unhappiness.

The balance line between life and death is like a razor's edge. Our life is a crossing of this thin edge. Nobody really knows what will happen a second later. Ohsawa sensei said we are born as we wish. I didn't know I was born as I wished; however, I know I lived the way I wished after the age of 32 when I began macrobiotic thinking and eating.

To me, the macrobiotic way of life is to eat natural foods so that we are able to receive, understand, and accept God's guidance and judgment. As Ohsawa said in his lectures, 'No words, on teachings, no concepts have value unless the lead us to God or Infinity.'" (Macrobiotics Today, May/June 1996)

On February 5th, 1996, Herman almost drowned.

He was fishing in the Feather River when an unanticipated release of water from Oroville lake caught him by surprise. He lost his balance trying to negotiate the slippery bottom, faster current and rising water. His body floated on the water. The more he struggled, the more he sank.

"For a split second the sad idea that my life was over" crossed his mind. He decided just to relax. "I lay back on the water and watched the sky. It was so beautiful and peaceful. This was the balancing point. I heard a voice saying not to worry. It was the same voice I had heard from my teacher Ohsawa by telephone many years ago while he was still staying at my apartment in New York while I was traveling by boat to Holland and had forgotten my passport.

I began floating towards shore where a man extended a branch and pulled me out of the water. He left before I could ask his name. To me he was an angel sent by my teacher Ohsawa because I still have some of Ohsawa's work left to do."( Ironically, on Herman's 77th birthday, arrangements were made to charter a fishing boat to take him out on Lake Oroville. The Captain of that boat turned out to be the person who saved him from the clutches of the Feather River.)

Soon after the fall equinox of 1920 , behind Nagasaki in Arita in Southern Japan, Nobuo Nishiyama (later named Herman by George Ohsawa to ease acceptance into western cultures) was born into a poor family of nine kids.

In this porcelain making town next to the white stone yielding mountains of Southern Japan, Herman had a happy childhood. Because his family knew they wouldn't eventually be able to keep him, he was told that his real parents were in Tokyo, working on getting a business going and that he would go to them when they were ready.

He got along well with his first family, growing up in the country, in a more yin environment. At the age of 9 he was taken by his Aunt and Uncle to Tokyo, where they lived as a family in a very yang environment and he ate very yang foods all the time.

He didn't get along with his new "parents". He became unhappy and confused. His heart wasn't being nourished.

Herman majored in metallurgy at a Tokyo University. It was here in 1941 that he first had the opportunity to meet Ohsawa.

Ohsawa was part of a seminar there titled Concept of World and gave a speech in which he included the principles of yin and yang. Herman was very interested and tried to eat this way at home, but became too yang because of too much oil, salt, and fish.

Many years later, after an unhappy arranged marriage and his wife committing suicide, he decided to go to Ohsawa's school to find out how to live.

He embraced Ohsawa's teachings and, in 1952, left the school and headed for America.

He was given a two month visa, but when it expired he had already decided that this was where he felt most comfortable. He had never felt that comfortable in Japan. For ten years he struggled with immigration.

In order to stay longer he enrolled in many different colleges and studied mathematics (which was easy for him because he wasn't good with the