The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (26 page)

Peasant forests have only recently come into focus in Japan. Before the past thirty years, foresters and forest historians were obsessed with the aristocrats among trees: Japanese cedar and cypress. When they wrote about Japan’s “forests,” they were usually thinking about just these two trees.
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There is good reason: these are beautiful and useful trees.
Sugi
, called “cedar” but actually a distinctive
Cryptomeria
, grows straight and tall like a California redwood, producing a glorious, decay-resistant wood for boards, paneling, posts, and pillars.
Hinoki
, Japanese cypress (
Chamaecyparis obtusa
), is even more impressive. The wood is sweetly scented and can be planed to a beautiful texture. It resists rot. It is the perfect wood for temples. Both hinoki and sugi can grow to enormous
sizes, allowing awe-inspiring posts and boards. No wonder that Japan’s early rulers did their best to cut down all the sugi and hinoki in the forest for their palaces and shrines.

Early aristocratic fixation on sugi and hinoki opened possibilities for peasant claims on other trees—particularly oaks.
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In the twelfth century, wars fractured the unity of aristocrats, allowing peasants to institutionalize claims to village forests.
Iriai
rights are common-land rights shared by villagers, allowing enrolled households to gather firewood, make charcoal, and use all the products of village lands. In contrast to common forest rights in many other places, iriai rights in Japan were codified and enforceable in courts of law. Yet it was unlikely to find a sugi or hinoki in Japan’s premodern iriai forests; those trees were claimed by aristocrats, even if they grew on village lands. But sometimes peasants could claim oaks even on the lord’s land; iriai can operate as a layer of use rights on land owned by others. Lords, provided for by others, didn’t need oak.
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Still, it is not surprising that elites have tried very hard to cut back on iriai rights. After the nineteenth-century Meiji Restoration, many commonly held lands were privatized or claimed by the state. Amazingly, despite all odds, some iriai forest rights have been maintained through to the present—to fall into difficulty from the late-twentieth-century abandonment of village forests as rural people flocked into cities.

What trees defined the iriai village forest? Japanese are proud of their location at the crossroads of temperate and subtropical suites of plants and animals: Japan has four seasons
and
is green all year round. Subtropical plants and insects are shared with Japan’s southern neighbors in Taiwan; a cold-weather flora and fauna are shared with the northeast Asian mainland. Oaks stretch across this divide. Deciduous oaks, with large, translucent leaves that turn color and fall off in winter, form part of the northeastern flora. Evergreen oaks, with smaller and thicker leaves that are green all year, come from the southwest. Both kinds of oaks are useful for fuel and charcoal. But in some important, tradition-setting parts of central Japan, deciduous oaks are preferred to evergreens. Peasants weeded out evergreen oak seedlings, along with the rest of the underbrush and grass that grew under the trees, privileging the deciduous species. This choice made a difference for the oak-pine relationship—and the architecture of the forest: unlike evergreen oaks,
which offer constant shade, deciduous oaks leave bright spaces in the winter and spring where pines, as well as temperate herbaceous plants, might have a chance. Furthermore, peasants continually opened up and cleaned out the forest, letting pines and other temperate species in among the oaks.
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Unlike premodern European peasants, premodern peasants in Japan did not raise milk or meat animals, and so they could not fertilize their fields with manure as Europeans did. Gathering plants and forest duff for green manure was a major occupation of peasant life. Everything on the forest floor was taken, leaving it cleared to the bare mineral soils favored by pine. Some areas were opened up to favor grass. The pillars of this disturbed forest were coppiced oaks; the most common was
Quercus serrata
, known as
konara
. Oak wood was useful for all kinds of things, from firewood to growing cultivated
shiitake
mushrooms. Periodic coppicing kept the oak trunk and branches young, allowing oaks to dominate the forest, as they grew back faster than other species could become established. On ridges, in open meadows, and on denuded hillsides grew
akamatsu
red pine,
Pinus densiflora
, with its partner matsutake.

Japanese red pine is a creature of peasant disturbance. It cannot compete with broadleaf trees, which both shade it out and create rich and deep humus layers that only add to their advantage. Paleobotanists have found that several thousand years ago, when humans first began to deforest the Japanese landscape, red pine pollen increased dramatically, from previous levels of almost nothing.
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Pine thrives with peasant disturbance: the bright sunshine of clearing and coppicing; the bare, raked mineral soils. Oak can drive out pine on peasant hillsides. But the practices of coppicing and the gathering of green manure created complementary spaces for konara oak and akamatsu pine. Matsutake grew with the pine, helping it to find a footing on ridges and eroded slopes. In particularly denuded areas, flush with pine, matsutake was the most common forest mushroom.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, members of Japan’s burgeoning urban middle class began to visit the countryside on outings associated with the search for matsutake. This had once been an aristocratic prerogative, but now many could participate. Villagers designated areas of pine and matsutake as “guest mountains” and charged urban visitors for the privilege of a morning’s mushroom picking followed by
a sukiyaki lunch in the refreshing outdoors. This practice wove an affective bundle in which matsutake hunting wraps all the pleasures of rural biodiversity into the escape from ordinary cares. Like childhood visits to one’s grandparents’ farm, matsutake outings scent the rural with nostalgia, and this scent has continued to influence present-day appreciation of rural landscapes.

Contemporary advocates of the restoration of Japanese peasant landscapes may aestheticize the peasant forest as the planned result of traditional knowledge, creating nature and human needs in harmony. Yet many scholars suggest that these harmonious forms developed out of moments of deforestation and environmental destruction. Kazuhiko Takeuchi, an environmental historian, stresses the extensive deforestation associated with Japan’s industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century.
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He argues that historical changes have been key to the peasant forests that today’s advocates have come to imagine, the forests of the first half of the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, Japan’s modernization put pressure on peasant forests, leading to massive deforestation in central Japan. Visitors noted the array of “bald mountains” visible along the roads. By the turn of the century, these bare hillsides were growing back in akamatsu pine. In some cases, pine was planted, for example, for watershed management; but akamatsu seeds spread everywhere, and the pine, with the help of matsutake, came up by itself. In the first part of the twentieth century, matsutake was as common and abundant as the pine forests. With growing demands for firewood and charcoal, oak coppicing was also active. The pine-oak woodlands of contemporary nostalgic views were in full flower.

Fumihiko Yoshimura, a mycologist and pine-forest advocate, emphasizes a later deforestation: the disturbance of the forests leading up to and during World War II.
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Trees were cut down not only for peasant uses but also as fuel and building supplies for the military buildup. The peasant landscape was significantly denuded. After the war, these landscapes experienced regreening: Pines grew up on bare landscapes. Dr. Yoshimura would like to restore the pine forests to a 1955 baseline, a time of regrowth. After that, instead of renewal, the forests deteriorated.

I save the story of the post-1950s transformations that changed the forest for later chapters. Here I want to spotlight the question of how great historical disturbances may open possibilities for the compara
tively stable ecosystem of the ever-young and open peasant forest. It is ironic that these episodes of deforestation gave rise to the forests that have become the very image of stability and sustainability in much contemporary Japanese thought. This irony does not make the peasant forest less useful or desirable, but it shifts our appreciation of the work of living with forest resurgence: everyday peasant efforts are often responses to historical shifts far out of their control. Small disturbances eddy within the currents of big disturbances. To appreciate this point, it seems useful to turn away from the nostalgia-driven reconstructions of Japanese advocates and volunteers, which lull us out of history by their aesthetic perfection.

In central Yunnan, in southwest China, peasant forests are not nostalgic reconstructions but are actively used by peasants. They are not considered objects of ideal beauty but disasters that need to be cleaned up. They do not look like reconstructions. They are messy at best, and sometimes provocatively so. This is the peasant landscape in motion, not recreated through nostalgia. Despite its offending disorder, in many ways this ever-young and open forest has a striking resemblance to central Japan’s peasant woods. Although the species are different, coppiced oak and pine form the forest’s architecture.
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Yunnan matsutake has different proclivities than its Japanese sibling: it grows with oaks as well as pines. But this makes the peasant-oak-pine-matsutake complex even more evident. Perhaps here, too, it is great cataclysms rather than only peasant ingenuity that allowed this forest resurgence.

In central Japan, I was offered attractively potted peasant forest histories not just by scholars but also by foresters and rural residents. Once trained inside this discourse, my work was easy; all I had to do was look and listen. Thus trained, I was surprised in Yunnan when the very idea of a peasant forest history provoked confusion and defensiveness. Everyone wanted peasants to be good forest managers, but it was through their skills as modern entrepreneurs, not traditional stewards, that they would know how to manage. Peasant forests were a modern object—a result of decentralization—not an old one, and the goal of forest experts was to make modern rationality possible. If the forests were in bad
shape, it was because mistakes were made in the past. History was the story of those mistakes.
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Michael Hathaway and I spoke to foresters and even forest historians. They explained how the state had enclosed forests, and how, in this time of reform, they had passed them back to the peasants via household contracts. They spoke of the 1998 logging ban, which was meant to stop the damage, and of the model projects through which new forms of forest management were tried. When I turned the conversation to forest histories, they spoke again of the state, and its mistakes. Individually contracted household forests were the new way to organize forests, and they would have to grow in places damaged by earlier collective management. The key, they thought, was to sort out tenure and incentives, allowing entrepreneurs, not bureaucrats, to manage. In these new times, the forests would be remade with the market. We spoke of laws, incentives, and model projects. I hadn’t yet touched the trees. I missed the aesthetic objects I had come to know in Japan, even as I now saw their strangeness.

When I arrived in rural Chuxiong Prefecture, people were equally unhappy with my Japan-taught questions. Village officials recapitulated national stories of changing administrative categories; but ordinary residents didn’t know what to do with those categories. Finally, one elderly man made a comment that started a more productive comparison moving in my mind. During China’s Great Leap Forward, he said, the landscape was deforested by the need for “green steel.” Wasn’t Japan’s Meiji-era deforestation also about green steel?