Chapter VI: The Volcano Alchemist and the Rock Extract

Asao Shimanishi spent fifteen years trying to release minerals from rock into water. What he produced may have isolated a working phase of Earth’s life-sustaining chemistry.

In the previous three chapters, I presented the Rock–Water Circuit framework, a theory that integrates insights from geology, hydrology, biology, chemistry, and origin-of-life research. Those chapters established a central idea: the same iron–sulfur–aluminum–water (ISAW) mineral chemistry that formed in rock helped initiate life on early Earth and continues to operate today, continually reforming and releasing the mineral inputs on which all living systems depend.

This conclusion should not be entirely surprising. Any planetary energy system capable of sustaining life over immense spans of time must also contain mechanisms that continually regenerate the energy gradients on which life depends. Without such renewal, the mineral systems supporting biology would gradually exhaust themselves.

When a Human Isolated a Phase of the Rock—Water Circuit

For billions of years, ISAW operated only within the slow machinery of the Earth itself. Water circulated through rock; mineral lattices hydrated and exchanged ions with passing water; electrochemical gradients formed and dissipated; and, ultimately, this energy architecture established the conditions under which life eventually emerged and evolved.

Then, in 1977, after more than a decade of solitary experimentation, a Japanese engineer succeeded in extracting the system’s mineral core, separating a geologically generated chemistry from its host rock and rendering it portable in liquid form.

His name was Asao Shimanishi.

What is remarkable about his accomplishment is that most scientific discoveries either identify previously unknown processes in nature or, in technology, create processes that did not previously exist. Shimanishi’s work belonged to a third, historically unusual category of discovery: he succeeded in isolating and stabilizing one of nature’s primary energy-generating systems.

This work was done by a single individual operating outside the scientific mainstream.

Reconstructing the Life of Asao Shimanishi

Over the past seven months of studying Shimanishi’s life and work, I have been challenged by the near-total lack of formal documentation of his personal life and professional accomplishments. That scarcity makes it difficult to speak with complete confidence about the full arc of his scientific journey.

What follows, therefore, is drawn from the small body of material I was able to gather: a few oral histories from people in Japan who worked with him or for his company, and a translation of what appears to have been his only public interview, published in a Japanese magazine shortly before retirement.[i] I also drew on a first-person chapter in a limited-edition Japanese book called Rock Water, written nearly twenty years ago by colleagues, based on notes they had taken during lectures he delivered in China.

Ultimately, I do not believe that Shimanishi knew he was extracting a foundational piece of planetary chemistry. His goal at the time was much more practical. To see how he came to it, however, we have to begin earlier, with the formation of the man himself.

Asao Shimanishi was born in Wakayama Prefecture in 1926. After finishing high school in 1944, he first studied engineering, then entered Osaka Pharmaceutical College in 1946, in the difficult years just after the war. His earliest professional work was in pharmaceutical research, but the interests that would later define his life had begun much earlier. From childhood, he recalled a fascination with rocks and with the hidden processes by which the natural world seemed to sustain itself.

One story about him that has been told to me since I first began studying Shimanishi concerns an experience he had in his early thirties. Sitting near the sea in meditation one day, he noticed a tree growing straight out of what appeared to be naked stone. There was no soil, no visible earth, only a narrow crack in a granite boulder from which the trunk rose, supporting a tree in full bloom.

Image 1: Tree Growing Out of Rock

That event appears to have influenced his decision to turn away from pharmaceutical research. He found himself less interested in the increasingly abstract sophistication of synthetic chemistry and the rapid advances of petrochemical and polymer science, and more drawn to working with what he called “natural starting materials,” with the sense that something extraordinary might still be discovered in them.

Soon afterward, he encountered a senior colleague from his hometown who showed him what he called a “mysterious mineral”: vermiculite. He later referred to that moment as his “Encounter with the Stone” and described it in retrospect as serendipitous. He soon learned that vermiculite was the weathered form of an iron-rich black mica mineral called biotite, which contained an unusually large number and variety of mineral elements, in some analyses more than forty. Although vermiculite is more open and hydrated than biotite, its minerals still remain tightly bound within stacked aluminosilicate sheets.

He knew that common elements could be extracted from rock relatively easily with acidic or alkaline solutions, but his interest centered on the rarer trace minerals. What drew him onward was the possibility that, once dissolved as charged ions, such elements might display catalytic behavior and unusual reactivity. He also reasoned that for those minerals to become chemically active in a meaningful way, they would have to be dissolved in water. From that point on, his aim was clear: to produce an aqueous mineral solution extracted from rock.

It was a simple idea, yet difficult enough to occupy the next decade and a half of his life. Outside work, he began devoting increasing amounts of time to what he himself described as a private obsession, a “castle in the air” project with no immediate practical application and no clear commercial objective, all the while aware that those who knew of his efforts regarded him as something of a fool.

From the start, he had little success with the acids and methods he first selected. Yet he persisted for nearly fifteen years, driven by a single conviction: that a liquid solution containing broad mineral complexity might be of benefit to humanity. He tested combinations of different rocks, acids, and alkalis under varying conditions of heat and water, advancing only through failure, repetition, and adjustment, with a patience measured in years.

He became, in his own words, captivated by the stone, so much so that he compared himself to someone being sucked in by its very name, hiru-ishi, “leech stone.” Working often late into the night, he continued experimenting, adjusting equipment, and enduring a grueling private research life. He later said that he barely noticed because he was so absorbed in it, and that under intense concentration, flashes of insight would sometimes come.

The ambition itself was elemental: to extract minerals in a form that could move beyond a single volcano or spring and enter ordinary water, soil, and life.

Finally, in 1977, he produced the exact liquid solution he had sought: a spectrum of minerals dominated by iron and sulfur, with dozens of other elements appearing in minute, yet still active, amounts. He named his extract Themarox, or “Rock Extract.”

One clarification will help here. Themarox is the concentrated mineral extract itself. It is not used directly. When diluted into water, it transforms that water into what Shimanishi and his colleagues called “Rock Water.” Themarox is the source. Rock Water is the active medium through which biological effects occur.

A Historically Unparalleled Achievement

It is my opinion that his achievement is unique in the history of science. Although many scientific discoveries begin with moments of insight that then take years to develop into practical form, Shimanishi’s path was different. He spent well over a decade working by himself on a single technical problem until it finally yielded a solution.

Further, other giants in the history of science had teams, theories, funding, or infrastructure. For instance, Pasteur refined revolutionary ideas within an ecosystem that steadily supplied recognition and resources. Although Mendel also worked alone for years and succeeded in mapping a single problem—genetics—he did so in approximately a decade less time. Tesla spent much of his life pursuing the idea of resonance as a transformative principle in energy and communication, but he never fully realized the system he envisioned.

Thus, as far as I can tell, those who had come before him either had a combination of collaborators and institutional support or met with success more quickly.

Sulfur chemistry became central to that process. In retrospect, aspects of it resemble what modern geochemists now study as enhanced weathering: the accelerated chemical breakdown of minerals in water to release ions and alter surrounding geochemistry. Under carefully controlled conditions, sulfuric-acid-based reactions could convert certain minerals into water-soluble sulfate forms while simultaneously helping undesirable metals precipitate or be filtered out.

The mineral complex Shimanishi released from vermiculite contained an unusually broad spectrum of trace elements derived from the original mica lattice. Crucially, those elements appeared primarily as sulfate salts, reflecting the sulfur chemistry central to his extraction process. In practical terms, this meant the minerals were already water-soluble and charged.

The result was a liquid mineral extract with a composition akin to naturally mineralized waters, carrying a broad spectrum of ions that could alter the water’s electrochemical properties. What mattered, however, was what happened when it was diluted into water. The resulting water behaved differently. Murky water quickly clarified, while foul, stagnant water became clear and oxygen-rich. When added to ponds, tanks, or reservoirs, impurities and contaminants gathered into visible aggregates that settled to the bottom.

What is fascinating is that this phenomenon mirrors what happens continuously in nature. In rivers, wetlands, and mineral springs, water is clarified by contact with rock surfaces, which release minerals into the water, causing dispersed particles and contaminants to coagulate and settle. What Shimanishi had unknowingly done was extract from rock a functional fragment of that mineral-water chemistry and render it usable through water in glasses, tanks, ponds, and irrigation systems.

When applied to soils or irrigation water, crops grew with unusual vigor, grasses thickened, vegetables ripened, and fish in aquaculture ponds became more active and resilient. He and a growing number of colleagues began describing the transformed water as Rock Water.

He obtained a patent for its use in purifying and clarifying brackish water. Eight years later, in 1985, his achievement led to the founding of Shimanishi Co., where he began producing Themarox, a citrus-colored liquid concentrate containing a broad and electrically active spectrum of minerals, fully dissolvable and readily absorbed. What is striking is that this mineral complex belonged to nature alone; it was not a synthetic invention so much as a successful release of a naturally embedded chemistry.

A famous three-and-a-half-minute Japanese news segment captured one of the most dramatic demonstrations of Themarox’s clarifying power.[ii] At a polluted brackish pond at a well-known Shinto shrine in Tokyo, the minerals were used in a public cleanup event. The pond, popular with students who came to pray for success in entrance examinations and studies, reportedly went from brackish to clear in four hours.

At roughly the two-minute mark in that segment, one catches what may be the only public footage of Shimanishi: smiling as he drinks the freshly treated water from a glass mug lowered into the pond on a rope. The same broadcast also showed smaller demonstrations. At 2:41, on the host’s desk, two cloudy fishbowls appear, each containing a single fish barely visible through the haze. One bowl is treated with Themarox, and the suspended particles rapidly clump together and sink, leaving the fish clearly visible and swimming in crystal-clear water.

Rock Water: Agricultural and Aquaculture Applications

Next, he directed his efforts beyond water treatment and into agricultural and aquacultural applications, testing water prepared with Themarox—what he and his colleagues called Rock Water—in agricultural trials, seed germination tests, and soil restoration initiatives in Japan and other countries.

It did not take long for farmers to notice certain patterns in soil and crops.

The rice didn’t just grow. The stalks were sturdier, more resistant to pests and insects, and the plants stayed upright instead of collapsing in wind and rain. Vegetable plots developed plants that grew with a vigor older farmers recognized from their youth. Golf courses began using Rock Water to ensure fuller, verdant, and more resilient grasses.

In fish farms and ponds, operators added Themarox to their water systems, creating Rock Water, and watched as foul-smelling, low-oxygen water cleared. Fish that had been sluggish and prone to disease became more active and fed more vigorously. Eels raised in Rock Water reportedly reached market size in half the time, allowing two crops per year. Stocking density increased by 30 percent, partial water exchange was needed only every 4–6 months, survival was reported at 100 percent, and finished eels sold for 2,300 yen/kg or more, compared with a conventional market price of about 1,600 yen/kg.

A few environmental engineers began using the solution in polluted lakes and lagoons, reporting improvements in water clarity, odor, algal blooms, and biota. As these uses expanded, the reports multiplied faster than the formal literature. Shimanishi did not work within academia, and his objectives were therefore not centered on research or publication. Instead, he relied primarily on demonstrations for customers to help grow his business. Even so, a small body of published studies and technical reports on the efficacy of Rock Water in agriculture does exist, including a UN internal report on a soil restoration project, a Japanese Ministry of Health field trial, a peer-reviewed seed germination study, and several later privately commissioned studies conducted in the US.

However, when analyzed as a comprehensive evidence base, the studies demonstrated an extensive list of improved outcomes:

1. Increased plant yield

2. Reduced immature or poorly matured yield components

3. Increased trace mineral incorporation into plant tissue

4. Increased photosynthetic activity

5. Increased antioxidant capacity

6. Increased disease resistance

7. Faster root establishment

8. Accelerated vegetative growth and thicker stems and leaves

9. Improved biomass accumulation efficiency

10. Increased soil microbial diversity and density

11. Improved balance among dominant bacterial species

12. Reduced uptake of pesticides

The number and diversity of the positive outcomes suggest that Rock Water represents a novel functional category in terms of its diverse beneficial impacts on soil, microbial, and plant health. Furthermore, although not formally documented, hundreds of compelling use cases were reported to the company and its representatives.

To this point in history, no single conventional agricultural input—whether fertilizers, biostimulants, microbial inoculants, or soil amendments—has been shown to influence all these metrics simultaneously. A summary of the above studies, along with links to the underlying reports, is provided in the endnote.[iii]

The Rock Extract: Therapeutic Applications

Readers may reasonably wonder how a physician ended up spending seven months at a computer, often eighteen hours a day, wandering far beyond the usual boundaries of medicine into mineralogy, water chemistry, geology, soil biology, agriculture, and origin-of-life research—a process that, I should admit, was not particularly kind to my own health.

The explanation is simple. For the first time in my career, I had encountered something that appeared to influence physiology not only in patients, but across living systems more broadly: microbes, plants, animals, humans, and even the water systems that sustain them.

In medicine, there is really no precedent for that. No vitamin, antibiotic, immune modulator, cytotoxin, or metabolic therapy operates across biological kingdoms, much less extends its influence into soil and water.

No physician expects a therapeutic principle to operate alike in bifidobacteria, basil, eels, potatoes, and people. The only other agent I could find with effects extending beyond mammals was aspirin, since its derivative, salicylic acid, participates in plant signaling. Although I found several studies on the use of salicylic acid in agriculture, its relevance appeared to stop there, as I found none related to water treatment.

Although the discovery of such broad applications led me far outside medicine, my journey into the world of minerals and water first began when I encountered the work of a physician named Hisotake Nojima.

Dr. Hisotake Nojima’s Super Mineral Solution

Nojima was not an outsider to medicine. He rose within Japan’s public health system and served as director of the Sawara Health Center in Chiba Prefecture before later becoming head of a regional hospital. Yet during his years in practice, he became increasingly troubled by what he saw as a blind spot in modern medical thinking. Research, he wrote, had become almost entirely focused on organic molecules while largely ignoring the role of inorganic elements, metals, salts, and mineral ions in biological function.

His interest deepened after he started treating patients with Rock Water. One of the first cases he described was of a town mayor with advanced gastric cancer. Surgery was being planned. The mayor’s family had heard that Nojima was quietly experimenting with a new ionized mineral solution. They were desperate.

Nojima was still in an exploratory phase. He adjusted concentration, designed a high-dose oral regimen, and proceeded cautiously. Based on many later cases, he noted retrospectively that gastric cancers, because they are directly bathed in the mineral solution twice daily, often respond unusually fast.

Within days, the mayor’s appetite returned. His pain diminished. He began to regain strength.

Before gastric cancer surgery, surgeons repeat an endoscopy. The first had documented a clear malignant mass. When they returned to confirm the target, the mass was gone. The hospital physicians were, by his account, confused and effectively speechless.

What struck Nojima was the disappearance of a documented tumor between two scopes, with no conventional therapy in between. He did not treat this as proof of a cure, but as the first signal that something fundamental was occurring that existing frameworks could not explain.

Whatever the tumor biology was doing, equally notable were the systemic shifts he described: appetite, strength, sleep, and mood.

Nojima then began offering the therapy to patients with advanced cancer who had exhausted surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. He repeatedly described observing pain subside and strength return. Imaging showed reduced tumor burden or halted progression. Infections improved unexpectedly. Chemotherapy became more tolerable.

These were not isolated anecdotes in his book. They recurred in a pattern. Over time, Nojima came to understand what he was seeing as follows:

“The minerals were restoring the body’s mineral architecture, and the body was doing the healing.”

What Nojima Actually Claimed

Because stories like the mayor’s invite distortion, restraint matters. Nojima never claimed universal cures. He documented recoveries, partial responses, stabilization, and non-responders. His insistence was that mineral architecture mattered to all of them. Many improved, some stabilized, and a few experienced remissions.

He also acknowledged patients for whom mineral restoration could not reverse the decline.

Author’s Note: The reports above come from Nojima’s own clinical writings and have not been independently verified through modern controlled clinical trials.

What struck him instead was a recurring pattern: when the body’s mineral (or aqueous) environment was restored, physiological resilience often seemed to improve. In his writings, he summarized this idea with a phrase that appeared repeatedly throughout his books: the solution was helping restore what he called the body’s “mineral architecture.”

Over the following years, he documented his experiences in several books (one of which was translated into English here in the US) and founded a nonprofit organization devoted to exploring the roles of minerals, nutrition, and environmental factors in chronic disease. At its height, he wrote, the organization had tens of thousands of members.

Although his work remained largely unknown outside Japan and was never integrated into mainstream medical research, his clinical observations represent one of the earliest attempts by a modern physician to investigate the biological effects of a sulfated biotite-derived broad-spectrum mineral complex.

Shimanishi also believed that the mineral spectrum in his solution could support numerous human biological processes. In his view, since minerals act as cofactors that activate enzymes throughout the body and enzymes require specific minerals to function properly, restoring mineral diversity to water could help restore normal biological activity.

He claimed that health improvements reported by users arose from this mineral-enzyme interaction, though he acknowledged that medical claims were legally restricted and should be approached cautiously.

Author’s Note: I recount the observations above as historical medical reporting rather than as evidence of established therapeutic effects.

Carrying Rock Chemistry Into Water

What Shimanishi isolated was a mineral chemistry capable of conditioning water into an electrochemically organized state, much like the mineralized waters that have emerged naturally throughout history from geothermal systems distributed through the Earth’s crust. In the framework of ISAW and the Rock–Water Circuit, what Shimanishi did, unknowingly, was extract from rock and carry into water a redox-active chemical set that geology had assembled long before.

What became of Shimanishi himself, and of the company that carried his extract forward, is harder to reconstruct, but no less important.

What Became of Shimanishi’s Work

On a recent trip to Japan, I tried to learn as much as I could about Shimanishi, including even the possibility of his whereabouts. I could find no record of his death, and the people still working at the company told me they had neither seen nor heard from him in many years. He would be 100 years old today. Although the Japanese are known for remarkable longevity, I could not determine whether he was still alive, but neither could I confirm that he was dead.

I met only one man who had known Shimanishi well: Mr. Ishii, until recently the longtime majority shareholder of Shimanishi-Kaken and, at 86, still its plant manager. He told me that Shimanishi’s gifts did not lie in business or operations, and that around the year 2000 a bitter rupture developed between him and the company’s then president. That conflict ultimately led the owners to dissolve the company and sell off its assets. When the plant went up for auction, Shimanishi asked Mr. Ishii, apparently the one friend with the means to do so, to buy it to preserve the production of Themarox. Mr. Ishii did. Shimanishi stayed on and worked for a few months afterward, but it seems his heart was no longer in the new company. He told his colleagues that he wanted to retire, which in Japan, even at seventy-four, was highly unusual. They later learned that he had tried to attract investors to start a new company of his own but had not succeeded. No one has heard from him since.

I came to see Mr. Ishii as the keeper of Shimanishi’s legacy, the man who ensured that his mission did not die with the collapse of the original company. Mr. Ishii shepherded it through several near-bankruptcies during the difficult years after the acquisition. In those early years, he had to rely on people like his younger brother, whom he asked to work for the company without pay. Even now, I believe the salaries remain modest, and the company’s leadership consists largely of retired Toshiba executives. In Japan, corporate men of that era were often forced to retire at 60. Yet many still have to find work afterward, since pensions alone are not enough to sustain a desired standard of living.

MB first met those men when they worked without pay. When he asked them why they did so, they replied, “Because we believe what you believe.” MB has never forgotten that. Nor has he forgotten that when he reached out to them during their first conversation, they told him that he would be the sole importer to North America, an agreement they have honored for more than twenty years, based on a handshake.

Coming into this small commercial world late in the writing of From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV), I was struck by that degree of trust and shared mission. Learning that both parties had worked peacefully and successfully for twenty years on nothing more than a handshake moved me and gave me confidence. It deepened my trust in what we were building and strengthened my sense of responsibility to carry that shared mission forward.

What the Ancients May Have Seen

In Shimanishi’s own region of Japan alone, the accessible vermiculite reserves are sufficient for centuries, perhaps millennia, of human-scale application.

This is not a scarce remedy.

It is a geological inheritance.

As detailed in From Volcanoes to Vitality[iv], if understood and applied responsibly, Rock Water may represent a path for the gradual restoration of soils, waters, husbandry, and even human health.

Beyond that aspiration, a separate question arose in the wake of my studies into Rock Water. If a specific mineral-water chemistry capable of organizing electrochemical energy has been operating quietly within rock for billions of years, and if a human being has now managed to isolate a working phase of that chemistry, then why do ancient traditions, alchemical writings, and even fragments of early scripture appear to describe processes that map so precisely onto this same mineral-water transformation?

The chapters that follow explore how this pattern connects modern science with far older attempts to understand the relationship between matter, water, and the organizing forces of life.

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[i] https://www.bodyrevitaliser.nl/en/aquarevitaliser/aquarevitaliser-ionized-mineral-extract/the-discoverer-and-inventor-dr-shimanishi-from-jap/

[ii]

[iii] https://pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/the-efficacy-of-themarox-in-agriculture?r=iutjw

[iv] https://fromvolcanoestovitality.com/

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