For the practical knowledge, see Kawaguchi's natural farming.

I went to the Akame farm school in Mie Prefecture to learn about Natural farming on one of their weekend events. It was lovely! If you're curious about it, I would recommend just going for the Sunday to see the demonstration, take the farm tour, and purchase some books. If you go on Saturday too, you'll have a wonderful experience of tending the school gardens, cooking, eating, discussing and bunking with everyone in a basic (but beautiful) rural house.

The greatest impression of Akame on me was its community. Unlike the natural farming of Masanobu Fukuoka - which seems to live on largely in his books, as I am yet to find thriving examples around the world - the natural farming of Yoshikazu Kawaguchi is alive in the Akame school community. This is certainly the future of natural farming that will spread, because its practical knowledge has been published (at least in Japanese) and is routinely taught by the passionate kindness of the community.

They offered multiple translators who eagerly described all the Japanese instructions in English and answered my questions. They cared deeply about helping me understand these ideas from my own curiosity. They do not preach the ideas, but they were extremely forthcoming and generous in answering my questions.

Knowledge propagates as seeds (in the theoretical and analytical knowledge that can be captured in media), but it is incomplete until it sprouts into a living mind through physical experience. Fukuoka's knowledge may be well-embedded in the seeds of digitised translated books, but Kawaguchi's knowledge lives on in the community he built at Akame.

Whether Fukuoka's knowledge will sprout similar communities remains to be seen, but even Larry Korn (the driving force behind the translation of Fukuoka's works) believed that Fukuoka did not succeed in spreading the critically important knowledge of regenerative farming.

Comparison with Fukuoka's natural farming

Though the Wikipedia page about natural farming depicts Yoshikazu Kawaguchi's version of natural farming as a restated form of Fukouka's, multiple people at the Akame school I spoke to seem to reject and disregard Fukuoka's natural farming as "bogus", unrealistic and with limited application outside his specific farm. Kawaguchi supposedly tried to implement Fukuoka's natural farming and failed.

What bothered me about this is that:

1. The practitioners at Akame disregard Fukouka's natural farming and its potential influence on Kawaguchi's. They told me Kawaguchi thought that Fukuoka's reported yields in his books were exaggerated.
2. Nobody within Kawaguchi has attempted to measure the yields, caloric efficiencies, or any kind of metric that may be used in analytical comparison.
3. There was not a record of Kawaguchi's experiments to implement Fukuoka's natural farming. I have asked someone at Akame to provide me with this if it exists.

In essence, it bothers me that they reject Fukouka's farming without describing why or how. However, it bothers me specifically because my goal is to find promising regenerative farming with sufficiently high yields to find benchmarks of natural farming. I believe these yields will be extremely helpful in swaying other farmers to adopt natural farming. I personally want to adopt evidently high-yield methods before I decide what type of farming I will do for my community.

The Akame community does not care for yields, but beyond my personal frustration, this is actually a credit to their passion; their desire to natural farm is because it feels nourishing to their souls in and of itself. Many people there described the intense joy and fulfilment it brought them to eat food they had sewn and harvested themselves. They truly embody this quote of Fukuoka's from The One Straw Revolution: "The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings."

Opportunity: translation and digital publication

There are hardly any non-Japanese texts on Kawaguchi's natural farming, and you cannot buy digital copies. Kawaguchi published many books, mostly about philosophy. I purchased one practical book on vegetable growing and another on Kawaguchi's incorporation of both natural farming and plant medicine. They are in Japanese, and I intend to translate them as best I can. However, the reach and translation of these ideas would be much easier if they were published in digital form. I intend to help publish them online if Akame will let me.

However, the practical books are complete with helpful diagrams, eg on how to dig and manage irrigation trenches for fields. They would be immensely helpful to many people, I'm sure. Kawaguchi's published corpus includes a package of practical natural farming; an English-translated introductory brochure at the farm describes the three tools you need to start natural farming and specifics for choosing them, eg iron over stainless steel. If you can read Japanese and English well, I urge you to contact the Akame school and offer to translate their practical texts.