God Reveals True Health
Written by Okada Mokichi, 1950

The World Swimming Championships were lately held in the U.S.A. There, an unexpected result was shown. No one would have thought that Japanese swimmers showed such a good performance, which was greatly different from that of Americans. Since Furuhashi made great records last year, I expected their considerable success but that was much more than expected. As you know, American swimmers were in the position of a champion before. In this regard, American specialists say that Japanese swimmers won because of their hard training. Specialists were surprised to hear that they kept practising for eight hours. Here we give you our opinion.

The result is brought about by the differences in their physical strength. It might sound strange but it is true. Everyone thought that Americans were physically better than the Japanese. When looking at the result of this tournament, however, Japanese physical strength is superior to that of Americans. They must admit this fact. Then why did that happen? We need to find out the cause. Firstly, it depends on what they eat. Americans eat meat a lot, whereas the Japanese eat a lot of vegetables. When a person eats a lot of meat, they only gain external physical strength. The inner body becomes weak. As you can see, Americans are good at sprint swimming. As for long-distance swimming, the Japanese are good at it. They are durable or in other words, they rarely get out of breath. The following article shows this very much; “Foreign swimmers swim fast at first but apparently become slow down when they swim over 100 metres though they have a good swim style. Like Blum or Jones, they swim fast for the first 50 to 100 metres in 400m competition. However, they become no good at all from 200 metres. That was caused by nothing but a lack of their practice. In the 800m relays, Maruyama and Murayama especially did well. Hamaguchi also dived in with full confidence. Furuhashi achieved an incredible result even after he swam in the 400m final. He swam in 1:01.4 in the first half and 1:06.3 in the latter half. Therefore, he made a world record. (Reported by phone from L.A, Mainichi Newspapers dated 20 August)”

Japanese swimmers won because of their continuous hard training. That would be true. We could say that they can endure such training because they have strong physical strength. In regard to this, I tell you about a foreign mountaineer. He only eats vegetables for a week before climbing the mountain. I have written in my book that Japanese farmers can endure their hard labour because they just eat vegetables. If they ate meat, they would be physically exhausted soon. It is true that vegetarians live longer. A famous English great novelist Mr George Bernard Shaw is still vigorous at the age of ninety-three because he is a vegetarian. Monks seem to live longer, too. A Buddhist monk Tosu Etsuzan, who recently died at the age of one hundred twelve, was very fine until just before he died. He directly told his will to dozens of people just before he died. From these facts, you would see that eating vegetables is very good for people to live healthily. People of today think that meat is richer in nutrition than vegetables. They will know that it is terribly wrong.

Translated by N.H.