It's also his green light to proselytize on behalf of hemp.
"There is no other plant with such a broad variety of uses," he says. Among them: clothing, soap, fuel, paper, building materials, medicine, liquor and, using flour from the inside of seeds, noodles. Nakayama sells a handful of such goods to bring in $3,300 a month in revenue. He lives modestly in a yurt, a giant Mongolian tent, on Oshima, an underdeveloped island an hour and a half by boat from Tokyo. "The business will get big later, after I have finished promoting hemp," he says. Meantime he is lobbying the government to turn Oshima into a special hemp zone to promote tourism and sustainable development and, he argues most improbably, to help prevent abuse.
Pipe Dreams - Forbes.com
