The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (16 page)

In addition, some of Open Ticket’s Hmong and Mien Americans have converted to Christianity. Yet—as Thomas Pearson has shown for Vietnamese Montagnard-Dega refugees in North Carolina—they have, from a U.S. Protestant point of view, a strange kind of Christian practice.
⁸
The point of conversion for an American Protestant is to be able to say, “I once was lost, but now I have accepted God.” Instead, the refugees say, “Communist soldiers pointed at me, but God made me invisible.” “War scattered my family in the jungle, but God brought us back together.” God operates like indigenous spirits, warding off danger. Instead of needing interior transformation, the converts I met came under protection through endorsing
freedom
.

Again the contrast: A centripetal (in-spinning) logic of conversion drew my family and my Japanese American friends into an inclusive, expansive United States of assimilative Americanization. A centrifugal (out-spinning) logic of conversion, held together by a single boundary object, freedom, shaped Open Ticket’s Southeast Asian refugees. These
two kinds of conversion can coexist. Yet each was carried on a distinct historical wave of citizenship politics.

It seems quite predictable, then, these two kinds of matsutake pickers do not mix. Japanese Americans picked commercially at the beginning of Japan’s import boom; but by the late 1980s, they were overtaken by white and Southeast Asian pickers. Now they pick for their friends and family rather than to sell. Matsutake is a treasured gift and a food that confirms one’s Japanese cultural roots. And matsutake picking is fun—a chance for elders to show off their knowledge, for kids to play in the woods, and for everyone to share delicious
bento
lunches.

This kind of leisure is possible because the Japanese Americans I accompanied had entered a class niche of urban employment. When they returned from the camps after World War II, as I explained, they had lost their access to farms. Still, many resettled as close to the places they knew as they could. Some became factory workers and were able to join newly integrated unions. Others opened small restaurants or worked in hotels. It was a time of growing wealth for Americans. Their children went to public schools and became dentists, pharmacists, and store managers. Some married white Americans. Yet people keep track of each other; the community is close. Matsutake help maintain the community even though no one depends on them to defray living expenses.

One of the best-loved matsutake forests of this community is a pine-studded, moss-covered valley, as smooth and clean as the grounds of a Japanese temple. Japanese Americans are proud of how carefully they maintain the area for both people and plants. Even the foraging areas of the deceased are remembered and respected. In the mid-1990s, a bold, white bulker-buyer from Open Ticket brought a load of commercial pickers to this area. The commercial pickers were not used to careful harvesting; they needed to cover a lot of ground to make the day’s pick. They tore up the moss and left the place a mess. A confrontation ensued. Japanese Americans brought in the Forest Service, who advised the buyer that commerce inside national forests is prohibited. The buyer accused the agency of racial discrimination. “Why should Japanese have special rights?” he reminisced to me, still sore. Finally, the Forest Service closed the area to commercial picking. The buyer went back to Open Ticket. But without enforcement, commercial pickers still sneak in, and hostilities between Japanese and Southeast Asian Americans
still smolder. Clearly, they are different kinds of Asian Americans. As one Japanese American picker unself-consciously quipped, “The forests were great until the Asians came.” Who?

Let me return to Southeast Asian pickers’ freedom. Certainly, it includes sneaking into forbidden places when one can get away with it. But freedom is more than personal daring; it is an engagement with an emerging political formation. I am sure I am not the only product of integration who was taken by surprise by the strength of twenty-first-century resentment of this program, particularly by rural whites, who feel left out and left behind. Some white pickers and buyers call their position “traditionalism.” They oppose integration; they want to savor their own values, without contamination from others. They also call this “freedom.” This is not a multicultural plan. And yet, ironically, it has helped bring to life the most cosmopolitan cultural formation the United States has ever known. The new traditionalists reject racial mixing and the muscular legacy of the welfare state that made mixing possible—through coercive assimilation. As they dismantle assimilation, new formations emerge. Without central planning, immigrants and refugees hold on to their best chances to make a living: their war experiences, languages, and cultures. They join American democracy through that single word, “freedom.” They are free, indeed, to continue transnational politics and trade; they may plot to overthrow foreign regimes and stake their fortunes on international fashions. In contrast to earlier immigrants, they need not study to become American from inside out. In the wake of the welfare state, this concurrence of freedom agendas—in all its unruly diversity—has seized the time.

And what better participants in global supply chains! Here are nodes of ready and willing entrepreneurs, with and without capital, able to mobilize their ethnic and religious fellows to fill almost any kind of economic niche. Wages and benefits are not needed. Whole communities can be mobilized—and for communal reasons. Universal standards of welfare hardly seem relevant. These are projects of freedom. Capitalists looking for salvage accumulation, take note.

… in Translation

8

Between the Dollar and the Yen

I
HAVE BEEN ARGUING THAT COMMERCIAL MUSHROOM
picking exemplifies the general condition of precarity—and in particular of livelihood without “regular jobs.” But how did we get into a situation in which so few jobs with wages and benefits are available, even in the world’s richest country? Worse yet, how did we lose the expectation and taste for such jobs? This is a recent situation; many white pickers knew such jobs, or at least such expectations, from their earlier lives. Something changed. This chapter makes the bold assertion that the view from a neglected commodity chain can illuminate this surprisingly abrupt—and global—change.

But isn’t matsutake economically negligible? Shouldn’t it offer only the view from a frog in a well? On the contrary: the modest success of the Oregon-to-Japan matsutake commodity chain is the tip of an iceberg, and following the iceberg to its underwater girth brings up forgotten stories that still grip the planet. Things that seem small often turn out to be big. It is the very negligible quality of the matsutake commodity chain that hid it from the view of twenty-first-century reformers, thus preserving a late-twentieth-century history that shook the world.
This is the history of encounters between Japan and the United States that shaped the global economy. Shifting relations between U.S. and Japanese capital, I argue, led to global supply chains—and to the end of expectations of progress aimed toward collective advancement.

Global supply chains ended expectations of progress because they allowed lead corporations to let go of their commitment to controlling labor. Standardizing labor required education and regularized jobs, thus connecting profits and progress. In supply chains, in contrast, goods gathered from many arrangements can lead to profits for the lead firm; commitments to jobs, education, and well-being are no longer even rhetorically necessary. Supply chains require a particular kind of salvage accumulation, involving translation across patches. The modern history of U.S.-Japanese relations is a counterpoint of call-and-response that spread this practice around the world.

Two bookends frame the tale. In the mid-nineteenth century, U.S. ships threatened Edo Bay in order to “open” the Japanese economy for American businessmen; this sparked a Japanese revolution that overturned the national political economy and pushed Japan into international commerce. Japanese refer to the indirect upending of Japan through the icon of the “Black Ships” that carried the U.S. threat. This icon is useful in considering what happened—in reverse—150 years later, at the end of the twentieth century, when the threat of Japan’s commercial power indirectly upended the U.S. economy. Scared by the success of Japanese investments, American business leaders destroyed the corporation as a social institution and propelled the U.S. economy into the world of Japanese-style supply chains. One might call this “Reverse Black Ships.” In the great wave of mergers and acquisitions of the 1990s, with their corporate reshufflings, the expectation that U.S. corporate leaders ought to provide employment disappeared. Instead, labor would be outsourced elsewhere—into more and more precarious situations. The matsutake commodity chain linking Oregon and Japan is just one of many global outsourcing arrangements inspired by the success of Japanese capital between the 1960s and the 1980s.

This history was quickly covered up. In the 1990s, American businessmen reclaimed preeminence in the world economy, while the Japanese economy fell drastically. By the twenty-first century, Japan’s economic power had been forgotten, and progress, fueled by American
ingenuity, appeared to account for the global shift to outsourcing. This is where a humble commodity chain comes in to help us cut through obfuscations. What economic models allowed its organizational forms to emerge? The only way to answer this question is to follow twentieth-century Japanese economic innovations. These were not created in isolation: they formed from tensions and dialogues across the Pacific. The matsutake commodity chain places us firmly in U.S.-Japanese economic interactions, and from here we can notice this chunk of forgotten history. In what follows, I let the thread of the story unroll quite far from matsutake. Yet at each step I need the chain’s reminders to resist the lull of current erasures. This is not just a story, then, but also a method: big histories are always best told through insistent, if humble, details.

Money can open the tale. Both the U.S. dollar and the yen came into being in a world dominated by Spanish pesos, minted since the sixteenth century from the exploitation of Latin American silver. Neither the United States nor Japan were early players, as the United States only came into existence in the eighteenth century, and Japan was ruled by inward-looking lords, who strictly regulated foreign trade, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The grand futures of neither the dollar nor the yen were evident at their births. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the dollar had gained the clout of imperial gunboats deployed in its name.

U.S. businessmen resented the tight control over foreign trade exerted by the Tokugawa shogunate.
¹
In 1853, Matthew Perry, commodore of the U.S. Navy, took up their cause by leading a fleet of armed ships to Edo Bay. Intimidated by this show of force, the shogunate signed the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854, which opened ports for U.S. trade.
²
Japanese elites were aware of the subjugation of China in the wake of that country’s opposition to British “free trade” opium. To avoid war, they signed away their rights. But domestic crisis followed, resulting in the toppling of the shogunate. A new era opened with the brief civil war known as the Meiji Restoration. The winning group looked to Western modernity for their inspiration. In 1871, the Meiji government established the yen as the Japanese national currency, intending it to move within European and American circuits. Thus the dollar, indirectly, helped give birth to the yen.

Meiji-era elites were not satisfied, however, to let foreigners control trade. They quickly worked to learn Western conventions and to establish
their own firms as domestic equivalents to foreign ones. The government brought in foreign experts and sent young men abroad to study Western languages, laws, and trading practices. The young men came home and established professions, industries, banks, and trading companies, which flourished in Japan’s push for “the modern.” The new money was embedded in new contract laws, political forms, and debates about value.

Meiji Japan was full of entrepreneurial energies, and international trade quickly emerged as an important sector of the economy.
³
Japan lacked natural resources for industrialization, and the importation of raw materials was seen as an essential service for the building of the nation. Trading was among the most successful Meiji enterprises, and it became associated with rising new industries such as the production of cotton thread and textiles. Meiji-era traders saw their job as mediating between Japan and foreign economic worlds. Traders were trained through experience in foreign countries, gaining the doubled cultural agility that allowed them to negotiate across radical difference. Their work exemplifies Satsuka’s concept of “translation,” in which learning another culture both bridges and maintains difference.
⁴
The new traders learned how commodities were traded in other places, and they used that knowledge to make advantageous contracts for Japan. In the terms economists use, they were specialists in “imperfect markets,” that is, markets in which information is not freely available to all buyers and sellers. Meiji-era traders coordinated markets across national borders; they also worked across incommensurable value systems. As Japanese have continued to imagine a “Japan” that exists in dynamic difference with something called “the West,” this understanding of international trading as translation has persisted, informing contemporary business practices. Trading
creates
capitalist value through its work of translation.