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MN: I want to ask you about your father's love of matsutake hunting.

RN: Well, he would, just like any, all the Issei men, they got interested. Once you get interested and you go all out. You're either interested in it or you're not interested in it, see? If you're interested in it, boy, you go every Sunday, rain or shine you go out there. And then later on, as the Nisei got older, playing sports, they're gettin' too old to play sports, say in their thirties or even early, late twenties, twenty-five, like that, they're too old for sports, football, basketball, like that, they went into picking mushrooms.

MN: Did you go with your father?

RN: Once or twice, that's all. 'Cause I liked the outdoors, but I went with my father once or twice and, well, there's nothin' to it, actually. But that's a big thing up there in the -- but after the war, maybe during the war, after the Japanese left Seattle area, then the Asians began to take it up and they wrecked everything. You know, Chinese and the Vietnamese, they come over there, they start taking, and they wrecked everything. So the Japanese got disgusted and I guess some of 'em still go, but it's getting too difficult now 'cause you got to go too far away. Well anyway, it's too many people. But in those days it was just the Japanese that went out into the woods to pick mushrooms. Nobody else would. Chinese wouldn't go. Japanese were the only ones. Then of course the older Nisei began to get into it a little bit.

MN: So tell me what you do when you go up there, what do you do to find the matsutake?

RN: Well, you don't do nothin'. You park your car, you don't have to go far, in those days you didn't have to go far from Seattle. You go fifteen, twenty minutes you're out in the woods up in the Cascades. You're already up in the woods there. So all you do is get yourself a walking stick and you look around to see, you get your bearings. There's no sign or anything where you're at or anything. You park your car anywhere along the road, you get out, three or four people, they look around, get their bearings, one guy goes this way and you separate. And you go through the woods and it's, up there it's soft wood, soft, and you can walk and you just, all you do is get the stick and the, like the Japanese say, you tsutsuku, they would just poke around, move the leaves and everything around. And you're always lookin' down. You don't know where you're going, but you don't go far. You're just walkin' very slowly with a stick, poke around, oh, here it is. And you poke your stick and you see a little mushroom come up. Now there's all kinds of mushrooms up there. There's a lot of poisonous ones up there, but the Japanese, they know a matsutake when they see one, instinct. They know which is good and which is bad. So you go tsutsuku and you pick up, and it was a known fact when you pick it you don't pick up the whole root. You just break it off and you leave the stem, the root or the stem. It's not very deep. You break it off there and you leave that root or stem in there for next year. If you dig it up you won't get no more. And if it's a good one, if it's a good, if it's a good bed you remember, somehow you remember it. And you don't tell nobody, not even your best friend, where that one bed is. That's how serious they take it, 'cause boy, if you find a good bed then, oh man, you found it. 'Cause when it rains at a certain time in the first of September, after the first rain it comes up real good and, oh, that, when they, you hear 'em talk about it. But if it don't rain at a certain time no mushrooms'll come out. You're lucky to get one or two. But if the rains come at a certain time in September, right after Labor Day, up there it comes out real good and you get a sack full. And you, you give it to everybody. And now you never now... that mushroom, they eat it, though. You make okazu with it, you put it in the rice, matsutake rice. You can't beat it. [Laughs] Then you give a lot of it away to your best friends and if you got a lot of it you could kind of dry it a little bit. But it tastes so good, that matsutake.

MN: What about warabi? Did you go warabi hunting?

RN: Yeah, warabi, it's not like mushroom, but you still find it in the same places. Warabis, you pick 'em at the base of the trees, and then they're good, but, and you can find 'em a longer time. It's not like matsutake where it's only for just a very short season. Warabi, yeah, they grow all year round just about. And they're good.

MN: What about fishing? Did your father fish?

RN: My father, no, he never did do it. Well, he didn't have the time to go fishing, but he never was much of a fisherman. But up there, oh man, Seattle, they all go salmon fishing. Not so much trout because you got to go too far away on trout, but up there salmon fishing was right in the bay. It was something, that, that salmon fishing. The Japanese were the only ones that go salmon fishing. Nobody else goes. In those days even the white people never went, never went fishing. It was all Japanese. I don't know if I told you, but in those days, back in the early '30s or before that, all the Japanese, they would go out in Elliott Bay, which is Seattle. You've been to Seattle? On the, they're all out there in their rowboats, and when the sun comes up way up there and on the bay it's all rowboats out there. All over is all boats, all rowboats, and when they come up to shore and look around all the, they're all Japanese out there. You won't find no white guy or Chinaman or anything. They're all Japanese in those boats, all salmon fishing. [Laughs] It's a funny thing. My brother, he went a couple times and he took me with him. But in those days nobody had electric, electric motors. It was all hands. But you don't go far, you don't go fast, just keep the boat steady. And my brother, he'd make me oar, keep the boat steady and he would just sit down and watch the line, but I had to do all the, keeping the boat steady. So him and I used to go together, but... and they'd catch 'em. Then if we had a, Jackson Street was the main street that goes right down to the ocean, and daylight comes they'd begin to come in gradually, eight o'clock they all check in their boats and walk up the street with fish hangin' on their, they're all carryin' their fish in their hands up, walkin' up to their homes because they all live real close. Yeah, it was something.

MN: How did your mother prepare the fish?

RN: Usually she used to fry it, or she used to make a sauce with shoyu sometimes. And sometimes she'd salt it down. But those days nobody ate fish except Japanese. We used to get all kinds of, all kinds of fish.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.