Born Nyoichi Sakurazawa in 1893 in Shingu City, Japan, into a poor samurai family, he watched Western medicine fail to save his mother and three siblings. As a teenager facing a terminal diagnosis of tuberculosis, he rebelled and turned to the suppressed shokuku movement of Dr. Sagan Ishizuka, applying the ancient concept of yin and yang to biology through a strict diet of brown rice, sea salt, and root vegetables. He claimed to cure himself at nineteen.

Moving to Paris, he adopted the pen name Georges Ohsawa, a pun on the French phrase for doing fine, and formalized his philosophy with seven criteria of health that included gratitude and good humor. A wartime pacifist, he was tortured by the secret police after distributing his writings. He later popularized macrobiotics and the sanpaku diagnostic, and died of a heart attack in 1966 at sev ...