Polymath = Hyakusho

What is a “polymath”? What on earth is Polymath Research researching? We give our own meaning to “polymath,” a word many people have never heard. In this article, we will try to answer the question so many people have.

Polymath Means Hyakusho

“Polymath” means “hyakusho” (百姓). Hyakusho is a Japanese word for farmers. Long ago, people used it with respect, but at some point it became a “humble” word that farmers used for themselves, or that others used for farmers.

A farmer’s work is very wide-ranging. Farmers hold so many jobs at once that, if you listed them, you might easily count around a hundred. In the hierarchy of modern society, which values specialization, holding many jobs at once is not much encouraged. A set of values has formed in which it is more “respectable” to have a “livelihood” based on one excellent specialist skill, like a doctor or a scholar.

We can easily predict the objection: “No, no, that’s not true. Farming is a fine job too.” But how many parents send their children to cram school so they can become farmers, or pay high tuition to send them to an agriculture faculty? Public perception correlates very closely with basic statistics, such as the income distribution of farm workers and the change in the number of farm workers over time.

Farmers Can Grow Their Own Food

Because farmers have the ability to grow their own food, they may not be strictly measurable by the yardstick of the capitalist economy. Some farmers with organic or natural farming skills might even be able to live a fully self-sufficient life if it came to that. On the other hand, conventional farming relies on chemical pesticides and chemical fertilizers and depends so heavily on outside inputs that a farmer’s ability to feed themselves becomes a castle built on sand.

All over the world, there are people who know how to live on the gifts of nature, such as the gifts of the mountains and the sea. By bringing their cost of living close to zero, they live like “farmer aristocrats.” If people have the skills to get not only food but even energy from nature, they come to use the exchange economy of capitalism the way one uses a flea-market app like Mercari. They stop being used by the capitalist economy and become the ones who use it. And they do so not as financial investors who play the markets for stocks and bonds, but as “nature investors” who work directly with nature’s own market for energy and matter.

Beyond making use of its scarcity, “gold” may still have many important technical uses based on its physical properties. The potential of farmers as nature investors is greatly underestimated. Farmers, more than anyone, need to turn toward learning, master multiple fields of study, and play an active role as evolved “hyakusho.”

From the Human Economy to the Cosmic Economy

The “human economy,” which is not even connected to the Earth’s economy, is an economy that works only among humans, and its scale is still very small. Now that private companies are finally going into space and a space industry is starting up, business leaders who think on the Kardashev scale, in terms of a planetary economy or a solar-system economy, have also begun to appear.

The biggest challenge in the cosmic economy is “self-sufficiency.” Without self-sufficiency in energy and food, we cannot live on any planet other than Earth. Unless we solve the problem of self-sufficiency, humanity cannot become a multiplanetary species.

Four billion years have passed since life began on Earth. The greatest challenge in the history of life on Earth depends on the ability to be self-sufficient. In other words, it depends on whether humanity can begin the work of cosmic hyakusho, control the 92 elements on a cosmic scale, and carry out cosmic farming, that is, terraforming.

Working backward from there, we think it will feel self-evident that we need a growth system that makes use of the innate versatility of humanity’s children and lets them grow up as cosmic hyakusho (polymaths).