In 1977, a Japanese Engineer Did Something Geology Takes Millions of Years to Do

After two decades of solitary experimentation, a Japanese engineer isolated a functioning phase of Earth’s mineral-energy system and brought it into the human world. History barely noticed.

I want to thank the readers who stuck with me over the last three posts, in which I presented a theory called the Rock-Water Circuit, integrating findings from fields as diverse as geology, hydrology, biology, chemistry, and origin-of-life science.

Since it may have been too “scienc-ey” for some, know that it is over now. We will be leaving science behind as we continue the rest of the journey this book (i.e., series of posts) will take you on.

A core insight of our proposed Rock–Water Circuit framework, which goes beyond current origin-of-life models, is that the same iron–sulfur–aluminum–water (ISAW) mineral chemistry thought to have helped initiate life on early Earth also plays a central role in re-releasing the minerals that sustain biological systems today.

That insight should actually be unsurprising in a way. Any energy system capable of sustaining life on Earth must include a mechanism that continually renews the energy gradients on which lifeforms depend. Without it, mineral systems would gradually exhaust themselves.

When a Human Isolated a Phase of the Planetary 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 the planetary energy architecture sustained the conditions under which life eventually emerged and evolved.

Then, in the twentieth century, a human being isolated a working phase of it.

In 1977, after two decades of solitary experimentation, a Japanese engineer succeeded in extracting and stabilizing a single operational link in the Rock–Water Circuit, separating a geologically generated chemistry from its mineral host, rendering it portable in liquid form.

His name was Asao Shimanishi.

What is truly remarkable about his accomplishment is that most scientific discoveries either newly map previously unknown processes in nature or, in technology, create processes that did not previously exist. Shimanishi’s work fell into a third, historically unusual category of discovery: he succeeded in isolating and stabilizing a functioning phase of a planetary process.

This was not the work of a famous academic, a government laboratory, or a large industrial research group.

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

The Question That Volcanic Water Raised

I do not believe that Shimanishi knew he was extracting a foundational piece of planetary chemistry. His goal was far more practical at the time.

In the 1950s, given that he was trained in both mining and engineering, he had already become troubled by data showing that modern agriculture and industrial development were gradually stripping soils and water of the complex spectrum of trace minerals that had historically sustained both ecosystems and human nutrition.

The story begins when Shimanishi was in his thirties, sitting near the water in meditation. As he gazed across the landscape, something caught his attention: 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.

Where was it getting nourishment? Seeing a full-grown tree thriving from bare rock, Shimanishi began to suspect that the mineral composition of the rock held a unique energy or vitality that likely reminded him of volcanic regions that often produced springs whose waters were widely regarded as unusually restorative.

Later, he discovered that the rock was an iron-rich mica, known for containing an extraordinary spectrum of trace elements, and he began to wonder whether the properties of certain waters might arise from the minerals they acquire as they pass through different rocks.

His ambition eventually crystallized into a simple idea.

It was an idea simple enough to describe in a sentence, yet difficult enough to occupy the next twenty years of his life.

The vermiculite species or rock that he chose was a weathered derivative of biotite, a layered iron-bearing mica typically formed deep within Earth’s crust. Although vermiculite is more open and hydrated than biotite, its minerals remain tightly bound within stacked aluminosilicate sheets.

Simply mixing the rock mineral with water would not release the desired spectrum of ions. Strong acids could dissolve the structure entirely, but doing so would produce unstable and potentially toxic mixtures. Gentle leaching methods were safer but painfully slow, often producing only weak solutions after years of extraction.

For twenty years, he was driven by a single conviction: that restoring the mineral complexity modern life was quietly losing might be of benefit to humanity.

He worked directly with rock, heat, water, sulfur, and time, advancing only through repetition, failure, adjustment, and patience measured in years. Shimanishi had one stone, one question, and the discipline to remain with it until the problem finally yielded.

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.

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 more than 2 decades working 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. And although Mendel also worked alone for years, and similarly succeeded in mapping out a single problem, genetics, it took him approximately a decade less. 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 had either a combination of collaborators and institutional support or met with success more quickly. Shimanishi had one rock, one question, and for twenty years, he worked alone, altering temperatures, acid strengths, reaction times, sulfur sources, heating and cooling cycles, and filtration methods. Each change solved one problem but created several new ones. Too harsh a treatment destabilized the chemistry. Too gentle a process released almost nothing.

Sulfur chemistry eventually became central to the process. In retrospect, aspects of this process resemble what modern geochemists now study as enhanced weathering, the accelerated chemical breakdown of minerals in water to release ions and alter surrounding geochemistry.

But after nearly twenty years of iteration, failure, and refinement, he discovered that, under carefully controlled conditions, sulfur-based reactions could convert certain minerals into water-soluble sulfate forms while simultaneously helping undesirable metals precipitate or be filtered out.

In 1977, he produced a liquid solution containing a spectrum of minerals, dominated by iron and sulfur, with dozens of other elements appearing in minute (yet still active) amounts. He named this extract Themarox, or “Rock Extract.”

What followed was unexpected. When the extract was added to water, it seemed to awaken processes already present in nature. Murky water clarified. Suspended debris gathered into visible clusters and settled to the bottom. In ponds and fish tanks, foul, stagnant water became clear and oxygen-rich.

When applied to soils and irrigation water, crops grew with unusual vigor, grasses thickened, vegetables strengthened, and fish in aquaculture ponds became more active and resilient. Again and again, the extract appeared to stimulate the same self-organizing processes that nature uses to clean water, restore soil, and support living systems.

The Rock Extract: Water Purification

The mineral complex Shimanishi released from vermiculite contained an unusually broad spectrum of trace elements derived from the original mica lattice. Crucially, the 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 that behaved much like naturally mineralized waters, carrying a dense spectrum of ions capable of conditioning the surrounding water’s electrochemical environment.

One of the first properties Shimanishi noticed was its ability to clarify water. 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 a working fragment of nature, a phase of Earth’s mineral–water chemistry normally confined to rocks and sediments, and which could now operate inside glasses and containers.

He obtained a patent for its use in purifying and clarifying brackish water. Eight years later, in 1985, his innovative achievement led to the founding of Shimanishi Co., where he began producing Themarox®, a citrus-colored liquid containing a “perfect symphony” of minerals (my words), electrically charged, fully dissolvable, and readily absorbed. What’s impressive is that this mineral complex belonged to nature alone; no man-made process could have synthesized a composition of minerals like these.

As an illustration of the clarifying and purifying properties of Themarox, there is a famous 3.5-minute video clip from a Japanese news broadcast of a “clean-up” event where his minerals were used to clarify a brackish, polluted pond at a famous Shinto shrine in Tokyo. The pond was especially popular with Japanese students who visited to pray for success in entrance exams and studies. The pond went from brackish to clear in 4 hours.

At the 2:00 mark, you’ll catch the only public sighting of Shimanishi that I am aware of, smiling as he drinks the freshly treated pond water from a glass mug that they had lowered into the pond on a rope.

Others performed similar demonstrations in smaller tanks and bowls. At 2:41 in the same television segment above, on the host’s desk, two cloudy, contaminated fishbowls are shown, each containing a single fish barely visible through the haze. The host then treats one bowl with Themarox, and viewers can be heard reacting in surprise as the suspended particles clump together and sink, leaving the fish clearly visible and swimming in crystal-clear water.

The Rock Extract: Agricultural Applications

Next, he directed his efforts beyond water treatment and into agricultural and aquacultural applications, moving Themarox into 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 buying Themarox to ensure fuller, verdant, and more resilient grasses.

In fish farms and ponds, operators added his extract 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. The mortality in eel farms dropped, and the eels reportedly scored the highest quality meat grades in the sushi market. A few environmental engineers began using the solution in polluted lakes and lagoons, reporting improvements in water clarity, odor, algal blooms, and biota.

Problem: Shimanishi did not work within academia; thus, his objectives were not centered on research and publication. He preferred relying on demonstrations to customers to help grow his business.

Despite not being a pure academic (although a brilliant scientist), there does exist a small collection of published studies and technical reports on the efficacy of Themaraox in agriculture, including a U.N. internal report of a soil restoration project, a Japanese Ministry of Health field trial, a peer-reviewed seed germination study, and company video archives.

However, based on a comprehensive analysis of the existing evidence base, which includes two recent studies conducted by U.S distributors of Themarox-derived solutions, the number and diversity of the positive outcomes suggest that Themarox represents a “novel functional category” in terms of its potential impacts on agriculture.

The studies demonstrate coordinated improvements in;

1. plant yield

2. photosynthetic activity,

3. antioxidant capacity

4. disease resistance

5. nutrient uptake

6. reductions in immature yield components

7. increased soil microbial diversity

8. improved balance among dominant bacterial species

9. enhanced soil habitat quality

10. significantly reduced uptake of pesticide residues (an observation particularly relevant in light of growing concerns about glyphosate exposure).

A summary of the above studies, including the reports themselves, has been compiled in a separate post here, detailing the precise magnitudes of the observed improvements for each outcome listed above.

What I am trying to communicate to the public (and the world) is that, to this point in history, no single conventional agricultural input, either fertilizers, biostimulants, microbial inoculants, or soil amendments, has been shown to influence all these metrics simultaneously.

More difficult to write off, although not formally documented, are the thousands of use cases reported to the company and its representatives.

The Rock Extract: Therapeutic Applications

Readers sometimes wonder how yours truly, a physician, ended up spending what is now seven months glued to a computer for eighteen hours a day, wandering far outside medicine into mineralogy, water chemistry, geology, soil biology, agriculture, and origin-of-life science (which has done noticeable damage to his own health in the process).

The explanation is straightforward: for the first time in my career, I had stumbled onto something that appeared to influence physiology not just in patients, but across entire living systems — microbes, plants, animals, humans, and even the water systems that sustain them.

There is no precedent for that in medicine, really. No vitamin, antibiotic, immune modulator, cytotoxin, or metabolic therapy operates across biological kingdoms, let alone extends its influence into soil and water.

No physician expects a therapeutic principle to operate in bifidobacteria, basil, eels, potatoes, and people alike. The only medicine I could find that could be tolerated outside mammals was aspirin, as salicylic acid participates in signaling in plants, but even that analogy collapsed quickly. No one has ever treated a plant with aspirin (I don’t think).

But, for me, my journey into the world of minerals and water started when I encountered the work of a physician named Hisotake Nojima.

Dr. Hisotake Nojima and his “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 encountered a solution made from Themarox. 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 was the upstream shifts he described, appetite, strength, sleep, tolerance, repair.

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. Some improved. Some stabilized. A few experienced remission.

He also acknowledged patients so depleted that 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.

Nojima did not describe these observations as universal cures, nor did he claim that the mineral solution worked in every patient. 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) 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 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.

**I recount the observations above as historical medical reporting rather than as evidence of established therapeutic effects.

What I Eventually Realized Shimanishi Had Done

Seen this way, Shimanishi’s achievement becomes less mysterious and, in some respects, even more remarkable. He did not create a new form of water. What he succeeded in isolating was a mineral chemistry capable of conditioning water into an electrochemically organized state, much like the mineralized waters that have naturally emerged throughout history from geothermal systems dispersed among the Earth’s crust.

Ultimately, 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 chemistry set that geology had long ago already assembled.

An Older Pattern Comes Into View

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, if understood and applied responsibly, Themarox may represent a path for the gradual restoration of soils, waters, husbandry, and even human health.

Beyond that aspiration, a separate, rather unique question arose in the wake of my studies into Themarox. 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.

Author’s Note on Stewardship

Encountering Shimanishi’s work did more than reshape my understanding of minerals and water. It imposed a responsibility.

If what he had isolated truly represented a recoverable phase of the Rock–Water Circuit, with potential impacts in restoring water, soils, agriculture, and even human health, then leaving it confined to obscurity would have been, in my view, a failure of stewardship rather than restraint.

For that reason, midway through writing this book, I, along with my wife Lisa and my long-time practice partner at the Leading Edge Clinic, Scott Marsland, took the practical step of founding The Asao Group, a company that has made this extract accessible for careful, ethical use in drinking water (Aurmina) and for agricultural applications (Primorabio).

Some readers will undoubtedly question this decision, but know that I did not embark on this effort solely for commercial reasons; instead, my motivation was threefold: to make a profit, fund research, and disseminate philanthropically. In fact, those principles are explicitly stated in the Asao Group’s operating agreement as the guideposts for all future corporate decisions.

I insisted on this to preserve and carry forward Shimanishi’s ethos: to help humanity.

In this way, the formation of the Asao Group is an attempt to ensure that a potentially consequential material, if validated through continued observation and study, would not remain locked behind geography, language, or historical accident.

The scientific argument of this book stands independently of that effort; the company arose in response to it, not as its justification.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.

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*If what you just read raised questions about the mineral system at the center of it, you can explore it further at Aurmina.com or Primorabio.com, where we are working to make Shimanishi’s extraordinary achievement more widely available for both drinking water and agricultural applications, respectively.

WORLD WATER DAY SALE

Dear Readers, please note that next Sunday is World Water Day, which we will be celebrating with a Spring Sale discount of 25% off both Aurmina and Primora Bio, starting Thursday, March 19th, through Sunday, March 22nd.

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From Research to Practice - Links Below

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could Have Ended The Pandemic

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States