The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (46 page)

19
. The Imperial Japanese Army had confiscated these forests in 1939, while nevertheless confirming traditional access rights. U.S. occupying forces took the area from the Japanese; Japanese Self-Defense Forces reclaimed it from the Americans. Margaret McKean, “Management of traditional common lands in Japan,” in
Proceedings of the conference on common property resource management April 21–26, 1985
, ed. Daniel Bromley, 533–592 (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1986), 574.

20
. Akao, “Private forestry,” 32; Yoshiya
I
wai and Kiyoshi
Y
ukutake, “Japan’s wood trade,” in
Forestry
, ed. Iwai, 244–256, on 247, 249.

21
. Akao, “Private forestry,” 32.

22
. Ibid., 33.

23
. Robbins,
Landscapes of conflict
, xviii.

24
. In the 1980s, Indonesia restricted exports of raw logs and built a plywood processing industry. Japanese trading companies began buying more logs from Sarawak and Papua New Guinea. Easy pickings did not last long in any place, but trading companies kept moving to new supply areas. The matsutake forests I visited in Yunnan, China, felled in the 1970s for foreign exchange, were part of this 1970s Japanese import boom. Since I do not find China on Iwai and Yukutake’s table of imported logs, I assume those logs entered Japan without full papers. Iwai and Yukutake, “Japan’s wood trade,” 248.

25
. See Totman,
Green archipelago
(cited in chap. 13, n. 8).

26
. Fujiwara, “Silviculture in Japan,” 20. John Knight recounts how forested villages asked for help to continue to maintain their forests. Knight, “The forest grant movement in Japan,” in
Environmental movements in Asia
, ed. Arne Kalland and Gerard Persoon, 110–130 (Oslo: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 1998).

C
HAPTER 16.
S
CIENCE AS
T
RANSLATION

1
. “Translation” is a key term for the actor-network theory conceived by Bruno Latour and John Law, where it refers to articulations between humans and those nonhumans working with humans, such as technologies; through translation, in this usage, networks of action emerge that include humans and nonhumans equally. An early and influential exposition of this position is Michel Callon, “Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Bruic Bay,” in
Power, action and belief
, ed. John Law, 196–223 (London: Routledge, 1986).

2
. The question of translation here forms part of a larger scholarly discussion about “modernity.” European common sense, which science studies too often takes for granted, shows us a modernity formed of Western thought, which has become universal. In contrast, that postcolonial theory that emerged from Asia in the late twentieth century showed modernity formed in power-laden interchanges between the global north and south. The emergence of modernity as a project is best understood in the first instance outside the West—for example, in the kingdom of Siam or colonial India. In these places, one sees the play of power, events, and ideas in which organizational and ideational complexes are formed (Thongchai Winichatkul,
Siam mapped: A history of the geo-body of a nation
[Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994]; Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe
[Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000]). This does not mean that modernity was not taken up in Europe and North America, and with distinctive variations. But to penetrate the smokescreen of West-is-all dreams, one must learn to see Western versions as derivative and exotic. From those Other places, it is easy to grasp modernity projects as partial and contingent, rather than overdetermined by a single cultural logic. This is the insight needed for science studies. (To complicate the situation, however, a new postcolonial theory emerging from Latin America requires sharply drawn
West-versus-Other cosmological distinctions, e.g., Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Economic development and cosmopolitical reinvolvement,” in
Contested ecologies
, ed. Lesley Green, 28–41 [Cape Town, SA: HSRC Press, 2013].)

3
. Satsuka,
Nature in translation
(cited in chap. 4, n. 2).

4
. Itty Abraham’s
Making of the Indian atomic bomb
(London: Zed Books, 1998) shows how postwar Indian physics emerged in the political conjunctures that created “India.”

5
. For an example of Korean research, see Chang-Duck
K
oo, Dong-Hee
L
ee, Young-Woo
P
ark, Young-Nam
L
ee, Kang-Hyun
K
a, Hyun
P
ark, Won-Chull
B
ak, “Ergosterol and water changes in
Tricholoma matsutake
soil colony during the mushroom fruiting season,”
Mycobiology
37, no. 1 (2009): 10–16.

6
. For an example of such collaboration, see S.
O
hga, F. J
Y
ao, N. S.
C
ho, Y.
K
itamoto, and Y.
L
i, “Effect of RNA-related compounds on fructification of
Tricholoma matsutake
,”
Mycosystema
23 (2004): 555–562.

7
. Nicholas Menzies and Chun Li (“One eye on the forest, one eye on the market: Multi-tiered regulation of matsutake harvesting, conservation, and trade in north-western Yunnan Province,” in
Wild product governance
, ed. Sarah Laird, Rebecca McLain, and Rachel Wynberg, 243–263 [London: Earthscan, 2008]) review regulations to show how flexible enforcement enters at each scale.

8
.
O
hara Hiroyuki, “A history of trial and error in artificial production of matsutake fruitings” [in Japanese],
Doshisha Home Economics
27 (1993): 20–30.

9
. The shiro is an alternative unit to the “genet” of non-Japanese researchers for counting “individual” fungal organisms. The shiro, the dense mycelial mat, is determined by morphological observation. The genet, the genetic individual, is sometimes described as synonymous to the shiro (e.g., Jianping
X
u, Tao
S
ha, Yanchun
L
i, Zhi-wei
Z
hao, and Zhu
Y
ang, “Recombination and genetic differentiation among natural populations of the ectomycorrhizal mushroom
Tricholoma matsutake
from southwestern China,”
Molecular Ecology
17, no. 5 [2008]: 1238–1247, on 1245). But the term implies genetic homogeneity, an assumption contradicted by Japanese research (Hitoshi
M
urata, Akira
O
hta, Akiyoshi
Y
amada, Maki
N
arimatsu, and Norihiro
F
utamura, “Genetic mosaics in the massive persisting rhizosphere colony ‘shiro’ of the ectomycorrhizal basidiomycete
Tricholoma matsutake
,”
Mycorrhiza
15 [2005]: 505–512). Technical sophistication is sometimes less productive than the inclusion of peasant knowledge.

10
. Timothy Choy and Shiho Satsuka, writing as Mogu-Mogu, have written about this turn in Dr. Hamada’s research. “Mycorrhizal relations: A manifesto,” in “A new form of collaboration in cultural anthropology: Matsutake worlds,” ed. Matsutake Worlds Research Group,
American Ethnologist
36, no. 2 (2009): 380–403.

11
. Interviews, 2005, 2006, 2008. See Ogawa,
Matsutake
(cited in chap. 3, n. 4).

12
. See, for example,
I
to Takeshi and
I
wase Koji,
Matsutake: Kajuen Kankaku de Fuyasu Sodateru
[Matsutake: Increase and nurture as in an orchard] (Tokyo: Nosangyoson Bunka Kyokai, 1997).

13
. See, for example, Hiroyuki
O
hara and Minoru
H
amada, “Disappearance of bacteria from the zone of active mycorrhizas in
Tricholoma matsutake
(S. Ito et Imai) Singer,”
Nature
213, no. 5075 (1967): 528–529.

14
. Ito and Iwase,
Matsutake
.

15
. In 2004, the team stimulated a mycorrhiza in a mature pine root (Alexis Guerin-Laguette, Norihisa
M
atsushita, Frédéric Lapeyrie, Katsumi
S
hindo, and Kazuo Suzuki, “Successful inoculation of mature pine with
Tricholoma matsutake
,”
Mycorrhiza
15 [2005]: 301–305). Soon afterward, Dr. Suzuki retired, and the team disbanded. He subsequently became president of the Forestry and Forest Products Institute.

16
. For a much earlier Japanese-U.S. collaboration, see S. M. Zeller and K. Togashi, “The American and Japanese Matsu-takes,”
Mycologia
26 (1934): 544–558.

17
. Hosford et al.,
Ecology and management
(cited in chap. 3, n. 4).

18
. Ibid., p. 50.

19
. There are exceptions, and if matsutake research in the U.S. Pacific Northwest had been allowed to develop, the tradition might have exploded in new directions. Research flourished only between the 1990s and 2006; after that, funding cuts ended grant opportunities, and researchers moved on. One exception to timber-scalable approaches is Charles Lefevre’s dissertation on matsutake host associations in the Pacific Northwest (cited in chap. 12, n. 11). This was relational analysis, and, without any nods to Japan, it touched on common concerns. Lefevre even developed a “smell test” for matsutake mycelia; as in Japanese research, his work used and empowered nonexperts. Lefevre moved on to selling inoculated truffle trees.

20
. David Pilz and Randy Molina, “Commercial harvests of edible mushrooms from the forests of the Pacific Northwest United States: Issues, management, and monitoring for sustainability,”
Forest Ecology and Management
5593 (2001): 1–14.

21
. David Pilz and Randy Molina, eds.,
Managing forest ecosystems to conserve fungus diversity and sustain wild mushroom harvests
(USDA Forest Service PNW-GTR-371, 1999).

22
. James Weigand, “Forest management for the North American pine mushroom (
Tricholoma magnivelare
(Peck) Redhead) in the southern Cascade range” (PhD diss., Oregon State University, 1998).

23
. Daniel Luoma, Joyce Eberhart, Richard Abbott, Andrew Moore, Michael Amaranthus, and David Pilz, “Effects of mushroom harvest technique on subsequent American matsutake production,”
Forest Ecology and Management
236, no. 1 (2006): 65–75.

24
. Anthony Amend, Zhendong
F
ang, Cui
Y
i, and Will McClatchey, “Local perceptions of matsutake mushroom management in NW Yunnan, China,”
Biological Conservation
143 (2010): 165–172. This collaboration between American and Chinese scholars criticizes Japanese research from a U.S. point of view. The authors blame Japanese researchers’ site specificity for lack of scalability, i.e., “reliance on site rather than temporal replication … [because] stand-level productivity is difficult to test empirically” (167).

25
. Socially concerned Chinese scientists take matsutake research in a different direction, asking how land tenure might make a difference. In this discussion, matsutake is still a scalable commodity and a source of income, but this income can be distributed differently (see
chapter 19
). Some Americans, e.g., David Arora (“The houses that matsutake built,”
Economic Botany
62, no. 3 (2008): 278–290) are also critics.

26
.
J
icun Wenyan [
Y
oshimura Fumihiko],
Songrong cufan jishu
[The technique of promoting flourishing matsutake], trans.
Y
ang Huiling (Kunming: Yunnan keji chubanshe [Yunnan Science and Technology Press], 2008).

C
HAPTER 17.
F
LYING
S
PORES

1
. Interview, 2005.

2
. Interview, 2008.

3
. See Henning Knudsen’s and Jan Vesterholt’s taxonomy,
Funga nordica
(Copenhagen: Nordsvamp, 2012).

4
. Interview, 2009.

5
. The name
Tricholoma caligatum
(also
T. caligata
) is used for several quite different fungi, some counted as matsutake. See prologue, n. 11.

6
. Interview, 2005.

7
. See also Norihisa
M
atsushita, Kensuke
K
ikuchi, Yasumasa
S
asaki, Alexis Guerin-Laguette, Frédéric Lapeyrie, Lu-Min Vaario, Marcello Intini, and Kazuo
S
uzuki, “Genetic relationship of
Tricholoma matsutake
and
T. nauseosum
from the northern hemisphere based on analyses of ribosomal DNA spacer regions,”
Mycoscience
46 (2005): 90–96.

8
. Peabody et al., “Haploid vegetative mycelia” (cited in “Tracking” interlude, n. 21).

9
. Interview, 2009.

10
. Ignacio Chapela and Matteo Garbelotto, “Phylogeography and evolution in matsutake and close allies as inferred by analysis of ITS sequences and AFLPs,”
Mycologia
96, no. 4 (2004): 730–741.

11
. Interview, 2006; Katsuji
Y
amanaka, “The origin and speciation of the matsutake complex” [in Japanese with English summary],
Newsletter of the Japan Mycology Association, Western Japan Branch
14 (2005): 1–9.

12
. Manos et al., worried about how an American
Lithocarpus
might exist, have moved tanoak to a new genus,
Notholithocarpus
. Paul S. Manos, Charles H. Cannon, and Sang-Hun
O
h, “Phylogenetic relations and taxonomic status of the paleoendemic Fagaceae of western North America: Recognition of a new genus
Notholithocarpus
,”
Madrono
55, no. 3 (2008): 181–190.

13
. Interview, 2009.

14
. Jianping Xu, Hong
G
uo, and Zhu-Liang
Y
ang, “Single nucleotide polymorphisms in the ectomycorrhizal mushroom
Tricholoma matsutake
,”
Microbiology
153 (2007): 2002–2012.

15
. Anthony Amend, Sterling Keeley, and Matteo Garbelotto, “Forest age correlates with fine-scale spatial structure of matsutake mycorrhizas,”
Mycological Research
113 (2009): 541–551.