A meizanologist's diary (88)

24 November: If they won’t come to us, then we will have to go to them. And this is why we must reach a certain rendezvous point at 8am sharp. 

Parking the car in the shadow of a Fukuititan nipponensis – I have mentioned before, haven’t I, the pride we take in our local palaeontology? – we convene with other members of the Sensei’s mountaineering club.

The dinosaur turns out to be a bit of a distraction tactic, for our quest today is purely mycological. An hour later we arrive at a location about which I can reveal only that it is somewhere on Honshu. For obvious reasons, fungus hunters prefer to be imprecise about these things. 

So, while the sun burns off the last shreds of the morning mists in the valley below, we set off up a wooded ridge led by the club’s president himself.

If you’re lucky, you can sometimes find the button mushrooms known as nameko (Pholiota microspore) floating in your miso soup or in nabe (hot pot) dishes. These were probably cultivated in a dank cellar somewhere. Yet, as with salmon or venison, the wild variants are incomparably more sumptuous than those reared in captivity – hardly surprising when you consider that all cultivated nameko are descended from a single common ancestor.  Hence our unceasing quest for the wild variety.

Nobody is surprised when M-san sights the first nameko. Quite how he has honed his instinct and reputation for sniffing them out must remain a mystery. Like an expert truffle hunter, he seems to have a second sight for their terroir. Gesturing downslope – we are on a ridge wooded with beech, maple and Japanese oak (konara) – he points out some little yellow blobs clustered on a tree trunk.

The mushrooms seem to prefer the shady side of the tree, which makes them harder to spot from our vantage point. We scramble down to take a look and M-san sets to work with scissors to carefully snip their stems. If you just pull them off the tree, a lot of dirt comes with them, explains the Sensei.

Entering into the spirit of nameko-hunting, I dig my boots into the steeply tilting leaf mould and adventure my person yet further down the slope. 

Oh joy, an untouched tree abounding with the little buttons, each a-dripping with its telltale slime (“name” means slippery). One or two have grown to double the usual size, and the largest is garnished with miniature crimson maple leaves, as if presented by some high-class ryōtei for my delectation.

Using a pair of the Sensei’s scissors, I snip carefully at this rich harvest until my Tupperware container is brimming with the sticky trove. 

It’s at this point that I start to appreciate a sinister truth – the tree I’m harvesting is actually dead, and the nameko have colonised its rotting trunk, some even tucking themselves away under its peeling bark.

Looking around, I get the picture. The maple and beech trees on this ridge seem to be in good health, but it’s another story with the oaks (konara), many of which are prematurely bare of leaves.“Nara-gare” (oak wilt) has been documented in Japan since the 1930s, it seems, but outbreaks stayed within limits until the 1980s. Then, starting on the Japan Sea Coast, the disease spread to most of Japan’s prefectures. 

One reason for the pandemic may be that people have stopped cutting down oak trees for firewood in the “satoyama”, the woods bordering on villages. This led to a proliferation of older trees, which are more vulnerable to infestation by the longhorn beetle that carries the nara-gare fungus. And the disease has spread even faster in the hot dry summers of recent years.

Fortunately, it’s impossible to harvest all the mushrooms on this tree: some are out of reach, and my container is too small for the rest. And, anyway, canny fungus hunters leave plenty of mushrooms behind, to ensure next year’s harvest. I work my way back to the ridgeline, stepping over a fallen oak branch, only to find nobody there.

Hollers direct me to a kind of grassy buttress that falls gently from the ridge. Aha, everyone else is working on the mother lode of nameko. Here too, the mushrooms are growing exclusively on the standing hulks of dead or dying oaks. 

The mother lode of nameko
Photo by courtesy of H-san

But these fungi, uniformly small and densely clustered on each peeling trunk, are the top-quality “gokujo”(極上). Everyone is able to take away a shopping bag full, leaving plenty to spawn next year’s harvest.

Back home, the Sensei cooks up nameko-jiru, a rich mushroom soup. The following day, the mushrooms put in a repeat appearance as nameko tsukudani. And there are still enough to freeze for a hot pot later in the week. Well, here’s looking at you, nabe.