Hemp is one of the most versatile plants known to mankind. Its fibres can be used for textiles and ropes or made into paper. Its seeds are a valuable food rich in unsaturated oils, which can also be used as fuel. Hemp requires few pesticides as it quickly outgrows any weeds. It leaves the soil clean for other crops. When hemp stalks are dew-retted in the fields most nutrients are returned to the soil for the next crop.

When in the middle of the 19th century in California Levi Strauss invented the original jeans he made them from hemp canvas because it was the most durable textile available. Hemp could replace many uses of cotton, which uses 50% of all agrochemicals used in the USA. Unlike cotton hemp grows in many climate zones, from the tropics to subarctic conditions. It will grow anywhere in Japan, from Okinawa to Hokkaido. From the Jomon era until the late 1900s, when imported British and American cotton took over, hemp linen clothed the Japanese masses.

Hemp oil is so versatile that it can be used instead of diesel fuel or you can fry tempura in it. Before petroleum and electric lightbulbs, lamps burning hemp seed oil illuminated homes around the world. One ha of seed hemp produces about 1000-1500 litres of hemp oil plus several thousand kg of cellulose-rich fibre. One ha of fibre hemp produces about 8000-11000 kg of dry biomass.

As a renewable resource from living plants hemp does not contribute to the greenhouse effect. The growing plants absorb as much CO₂ as will later be released when oil or other plant matter is burnt. Unlike fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas) or nuclear fuels hemp could supply us with raw materials for thousands of years, without ever changing our climate and without producing waste that remains radioactive for millions of years.

Hemp is an excellent archival material, for use in paintings and books. Most famous paintings are painted with hemp oil on hemp linen. In ancient China the art of making paper from hemp (and mulberry bark) was guarded as a state secret, but eventually the knowledge found it's way to Japan, and also to Europe via the Arabs. Five centuries ago Gutenberg printed the first printed book in Europe on hemp paper. The first two drafts of the U.S. Declaration of Independence were written on Dutch hemp paper. Traditional Japanese paper (washi) was made from hemp and mulberry fibre. Nowadays hemp is virtually unavailable for this purpose though a limited supply of hemp paper has been manufactured in Tochigi recently. Hemp and mulberry paper are also used for ritual strips of paper decorations used at Shinto shrines. Japan imported the recipe for paper making from China where most paper still contains hemp today.