<Begin Segment 19>

MR: Can you tell me about the Japanese enjoyment of mushrooming?

HY: Oh, Japanese enjoyment of mushrooming. Well, in Hood River, that's a real, real old tradition, and I don't remember when I first went, but I was a child. And I remember the first time we went, I went with my mother and older brother Shu and my aunt, and I think it was some farmer, some orchardist from Dee, and he took us for what seemed like miles up the hill. We had sticks, and I think we carried a bento and so on, and this is for oh, I would guess I was probably ten or twelve or so, and it seemed like we walked forever up the hills. And you know, that day we didn't find a single mushroom. I said, "Well gosh, this is no fun." But then later on as the years went by, two, three years later, then the farmers and the orchardists and the Issei would bring in mushroom because what they do because times were bad is they'd sell the mushrooms on, I think on consignment in my uncle's store which was a combination general store, grocery store and so on. So they'd sell the mushroom because not all the Japanese in the valley knew where to find the mushrooms, and mushroom which the Japanese call matsutake, I mean a literal translation for that would be "pine mushroom," was very, very important at festive occasions particular during the New Year, and that's when the mushrooms came out is in the winter, beginning from the fall. So beginning from that time, oh, I would say in the 1930s and so on, nobody seems to know who found the first mushroom in Hood River. This is the Armillaria ponderosa. But imagine the joy of this man who, the first Issei who goes out hunting for deer one day, and instead of getting a deer, he sees something and says, "Hey, that looks familiar." So he picks it up and looks at it and smells it, says matsutake, probably mushroom. And this is something he thought he lost forever when he went to Japan because he picked them in Japan as a child. He comes to this foreign land up in these big timbered mountains and the rushing slopes, and he finds this matsutake, treasure. And from that time on in Hood River Valley, they had quite a bonanza going to Red Hill, to Mount Adams, and Mount Defiance and Frog Lake. And from that day on, I've been bitten with the mushroom bug, and I've passed that on to my wife, Miki, after we came here in 1951, and our kids. They're not too many third generation Sansei know about matsutake anymore because in the first place, it's very much harder to find than the old days. The old days, you'd go almost anywhere when the weather was good and the terrain was right. Those are very important factors. But now because there's so many restrictions, private lands, and we can't go on Indian reservations anymore like we used to freely, so it's much harder to find. But still, for true dyed-in-the-wool mushroom hunters like Miki and me, we go every year. You know, we're kind of infirm and feeble and old, and it's hard for us to get around, but we still like to do that. Now we have some other friends who can't do it anymore, and that's one of their heartfelt desires. Even to this day, they're in their eighties, you know. They can't do it anymore, so Miki and I are going to take some mushrooms to them, so they can relive it in their own minds how they used to do it ten and twenty and thirty years ago. So we'll take them some. But it's a grand tradition. It's not so much the food is so good, but it's tied in with so many old and cultural things that are highly, highly relevant to the Issei and the Nisei and to our children, the Sansei. They know what it's all about, so they enjoy it too.

MR: Is there a special way you prepare those mushrooms?

HY: Well, of course we prepare it, not me, but the womenfolk, the Nisei womenfolk prepare that in the traditional Japanese fashion. One of the most typical traditions is sukiyaki, and everybody knows what sukiyaki is. They slice up the mushroom and put it in sukiyaki. But one of the classical uses of matsutake is putting it in soup. And so they'll freeze the matsutake or preserve it in some way like canning and bring it out at either Thanksgiving or Christmas or particularly at New Year's oshogatsu, and they'll put it in a soup called ozoni. That's a traditional rice cake, rice dumpling soup, and they put matsutake in that too, and that's a very important way of eating it. But there are many ways of eating matsutake. But as far as I know besides steak and mushroom, American style steak and mushroom, it's the only way I know how to eat it the Anglo way. But otherwise, it's all Japanese. We cook it with pork and beans. We cook it with, sometimes just bake it and kind of preserve it in vinegar and sugar, and sometimes they even boil it down called tsukudani, so, but these are all traditional Japanese ways. Another favorite, my favorite way is in a soup that's called obunsho. And an obunsho is a soup that's made out of pork stock, and it has a, you know what nappa is? Nappa is Chinese cabbage and pork, sliced pork and blocks of tofu and lots of slice mushroom, and you make a big bowl of that and steaming piping hot bowl of obunsho and a big bowl of rice, grand meal, wonderful one dish meal, great stuff.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.