Amy calls it Power Hunting. We drive towards a lake on the south side of Mount Hood, cruising slowly and peering into the forest, when suddenly she hits the brakes, jumps out of the car, and runs up the hillside. I see her bright orange t-shirt puffing out from under her coat like a skirt as she takes rapid little steps through the trees. It’s a grey, chilly, and damp November day, but no matter how cold, Amy is usually in shorts and cushiony running shoes. I follow her up the hillside, where she calls out, “Not skunked!” meaning, “I found one.” “See anything?” she asks me as I get closer, her eyes gleaming. It’s a test. There is a matsutake in sight. With so many steps taken, can I make the last one?
Power Hunting means hunting by car, going where you know the matsutake are and seeing if they’re peeking out. Most of the time though, Amy and I hunt for mushrooms the normal way, on foot, stalking through the woods with a basket or bag. Amy Peterson is in her mid-sixties, around four feet ten inches tall, with transition lens glasses and an external hearing implant behind one ear. (“One ear has the best hearing the doctor ever tested,” she tells me, “and the other is useless.”)
A native of Gresham, Oregon and the grandchild of two Japanese immigrants, Amy spent much of her childhood weekends on nearby Mount Hood hunting matsutake and bracken fern. She tells me of years her family would gather potato sacks full of the mushrooms, which they stored all winter. Around ten years ago, my friend’s mom invited me to join the annual matsutake hunt that Amy and her cousins lead each year for nikkei, descendants of Japanese immigrants, knowing I am ga-ga for mushroom hunting. It felt like being invited inside The Magic Castle. Our group consists mostly of older Japanese Americans though non-JA close friends and family are invited to tag along.
Matsutake, or “matsis,” as Amy calls them, are prized in Japan specifically for their complex aroma, where they fetch handsome prices. I have heard people describe the aroma in many ways: cinnamon, Red Hots, old socks, ripe cheese, spice (which spice, I have since wondered), and earth. For me, the experience is like being attracted to someone’s body aroma, my adrenal system responding independent of my mind.
In Anna Tsing’s incredible book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, she describes how the process of deforesting the cedar and cypress forests around Kyoto to build temples left denuded hillsides with plenty of light, which favors pine trees, and with these, their symbiotic partners, matsutake. The aroma of matsutake (in Japanese, matsu - pine - and take - mushroom) reminded Kyoto citizens of the grander forests that once stood there, an aromatic cue to nostalgia for a bygone wilderness. Aroma is often our sensory passage to memory, and Tsing argues those memories can be collective rather than personal. For contemporary Japanese, matsutake smell of a natural world they have largely cemented over. Without pine forests, they lack an adequate matsutake supply to feed their appetite, so they have built informal economic supply chains to bring them matsutake from all over the globe.
For the first Japanese immigrants to Oregon, the matsutake they found in the forests where they worked as loggers smelled of Japan, a country and culture they longed for. In 1942, a few months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in a moment of irrational paranoia and racism, President Franklin D. Roosevelt hastily signed Executive Order 9066, sending around 112,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry in the West to concentration camps in remote, often desert locales. Around 33,000 did seasonal or annual farm labor including a group who went to farm labor camps where they cultivated sugar beets that were converted to industrial alcohol used to manufacture synthetic rubber and munitions.1 Many lost their homes, farms, and businesses. Amy’s dad’s family went to the farm labor camps in Nyssa, Oregon. Her mom’s family went to Tule Lake in Northern California, where her brother-in-law and cousins helped build the barracks that would later house a group known as the No-No Boys.2 Her mom, uncles, and grandfather were then moved to Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Amy’s parents married after the war, and she was born in 1954.
Living in the aftermath of internment, judged guilty without trial and afterward left with the burden of proving their loyalty to America, Japanese Americans have proved adept at creating new lives and finding steady, well-paying jobs. But there is a divide between public and private life for many Japanese Americans. In public, especially immediately after the war, their Japaneseness could be a liability, so it was often masked. But the Japanese American community found safety and support within their immediate circles and maintained deep community bonds. In private spaces, they celebrated their heritage and continued to evolve it. Matsutake culture exists in this latter sphere—as an intimate activity that brings Japanese Americans together, ignites old memories, and reaffirms their historic connection to the land.
For Amy, hunting matsutake is less about a connection to Japan, a place she hadn’t ever visited until 2018. Instead, the hunt connects her to her history and her home, Oregon. Every fall she visits what she calls “my mom’s tree,” an old pine where her mother always found “dinner-plate-sized matsis.” She crawls over the craters and under brush, knowing which trees have been productive in the past. She and her family complete this fall ritual by making matsutake rice (recipe below) and sukiyaki, a delicious and decadent hotpot with thinly sliced marbled beef and loads of matsutake, both perfect ways to capture and convey the mushroom’s potent aroma.
Matsutake still tease me with coy distance and appeal. After all these years of Amy’s mentorship, I’m getting better at finding matsutake, but the hunt can be like the cruelest game of Where’s Waldo where Waldo is not even visible in the picture. Often the mushrooms are underground and out of sight. The first clue they offer is a little bump as they begin to surface. I cannot differentiate the tufts of dirt and needles the mushrooms raise from other disturbances in the duff. I find myself poking into empty hole after empty hole like a daft squirrel who lost their acorn. The second clue, for the very adept, is their aroma. I cannot smell them when they are below ground, among all the other forest smells, although I witnessed a 100-year-old Japanese man (no joke) sniff a matsutake, poke a stick into the ground, and emerge with a mushroom almost as long as his forearm. So, it can be done. From a distance, I’m sometimes duped by a fatal mushroom charmingly nicknamed “Angel of Death” that’s also dirty-white. Luckily, up close it looks and smells like white chalk. But despite my middling success, I love the hunt, and the company, and so I eagerly follow Amy into the forest. Starting in mid-summer when experienced hunters begin their pursuit, Amy heads to various nearby volcanoes to gather matsutake that she saves in her freezer for a sukiyaki dinner fundraiser for the nearby Buddhist temple and matsutake rice for New Years’ boxes. She also scouts spots for the fall guided trip. I sometimes join her in these early season hunts.
The mushroom world is famous for its reclusive community entailing a hodgepodge of survivalists, type-A taxonomists, biologists, ecologists, spiritualists, homesick immigrants and their children, hippies and their children, and chefs.3 Like the scent of matsutake, the musky fragrance emanating from this motley crew attracts me. Finding mushroom people has become its own kind of hunt. Once, looking for matsutake in the woods, I found an old man with a cherubic face, white fluffy hair, and smiling eyes gathering white chanterelles and truffles. He introduced himself as Dan Wheeler, president of the Oregon Mycological Society in 1992 and 1993 and longtime president of the Portland chapter of the North American Truffling Society. I found no matsutake on that hunt, but as he walked me out of the forest to our cars, he told me about his early work to promote and distribute the Oregon White Truffle. Wheeler, who has a truffle named for him, Tuber Wheeleri, claims to have inoculated the first native truffles in a Douglas fir stand. In that moment, I wondered if I liked finding mushroom people at least as much as mushrooms.
Many devoted mushroom foragers, including commercial pickers, crave invisibility and choose to exist primarily in the alternate reality of the forest. Amy introduced me to Matsiman, who lives off the grid somewhere in southern Oregon researching the connection between matsutake and precipitation. As a kid, I met Hmong and Lao commercial pickers in central and eastern Oregon forests whose camps approximate their lifestyle in Southeast Asia. Some foragers, like Amy and me, only crave regular visits to the forest.
Falling in love with these oddballs helped me recalibrate my own sense of worth. Watching Amy hustle up and down hillsides, feeling waves of affection for her, I find a peaceful, if fleeting, acceptance of myself, a feeling that visits me most often when I’m in the forest hunting mushrooms. Amy moves with agility and focus, but her manner is giddy and childlike, full of energetic curiosity. She usually puts her long silvery hair up in a loose bun held aloft with a pen, but while tracking through the forest the pen always seems to slip out and the bun will slowly unravel without her realizing. When I notice Amy’s bun has come undone, she reminds me of myself, even though she’s 30 years older, Japanese American, a long-time Girl Scout leader, a Buddhist, a Disney fan, a teetotaler, the mother of two, and really nothing like me at all. But she has a sparky horsepower like a little truck—vroom vroom, let’s go, let’s go—a goofy carelessness with her appearance born of the same impulse to never slow down, and an eagerness to please and involve other people. I feel completely at ease in her presence.
For years, Amy wore a bright orange Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup t-shirt on every hunt. She got it for free at her security job at Costco and, like a hunter’s vest, its neon orange signals her movements among the trees. Lately, in a cheeky turn, she has started wearing a psychedelic tie-dye t-shirt of an orange mushroom radiating green, blue, and purple flames that you’d be more likely to see on a Phish fan than on a Costco security guard who doesn’t drink or do drugs. But its brightness has the same lighthouse effect, and I follow her beam wherever she tracks. Even though we’re foraging matsutake, half the hunt is complete for me: I’ve already found the mushroom person I was looking for.
Amy’s Matsutake Rice
You’re going to need a big rice cooker or an enamel cast iron pot for this because Amy does not make small quantities of matsutake rice. She is always making it to share.
1 pound matsutake, cleaned and sliced
1 chicken breast, boneless, with skin, sliced
3/4 cup shoyu
1/4 cup mirin
5 cups rice
5.5 cups water
Fill a freezer ziplock bag with the chicken, mushrooms, shoyu, and mirin. If you’re going to make matsutake rice within a few days, refrigerate it; if it’s going to be months instead of days, freeze it.
Put the rice and water in the bowl of your rice cooker or enamel pot. Dump the bag of chicken, matsutake, and marinade over the top.
Rice Cooker Method
Put the bowl back into your rice cooker, close and click to “cook.” After the rice cooker tings to “warm,” wait 10 to 15 minutes. Then, open the rice cooker and using a rice paddle or spatula, gently fold the mushrooms and chicken into the rice, bringing the bottom to the top and vice versa. Keep the rice cooker on warm until ready to eat.
Stovetop Method
Place the enamel or cast-iron pot over high heat and bring the water to a boil. As soon as it boils, immediately turn the heat to very low, cover with a lid, and cook for 25 minutes, or until all the water is absorbed. Turn off the heat and let stand covered for 10 to 15 minutes. Using a rice paddle or spatula, gently fold the mushrooms and chicken into the rice, bringing the bottom to the top and vice versa.
Lola’s Matsutake Rice
My recipe for matsutake rice skips both the chicken and the mirin. This is a straight injection of matsutake aroma. The flavor and murky color become strangely inseparable and alluring. My favorite way to eat it is as an onigiri (rice ball).
Makes 2 to 3 servings
1 cup haiga* or Japanese short grain rice
1.2 cups water
1 tablespoon shoyu
1 tablespoon sake
Small handful of matsutake (2 to 3 medium mushrooms), torn into bite-sized pieces
1/2 teaspoon
Put the haiga in the bowl of your rice cooker or enamel pot and cover by a few inches in cold water. Swish the rice with your hand to loosen the exterior starches. Pour off the white cloudy water. Repeat a few times until the water runs fairly clear. Pour off all the water, being careful not to let too many rice kernels fall into your sink. Add the water, shoyu, and sake and swish around. Scatter the mushrooms over the top and sprinkle the salt onto the mushrooms.
Rice Cooker Method
Put the bowl back into your rice cooker, close and click to “cook.” After the rice cooker tings to “warm,” wait 10 to 15 minutes. Then, open the rice cooker and using a rice paddle or spatula, gently fold the mushrooms into the rice, bringing the bottom to the top and vice versa. Keep the rice cooker on warm until ready to eat.
Stovetop Method
Place the enamel or cast-iron pot over high heat and bring the water to a boil. As soon as it boils, immediately turn the heat to very low, cover with a lid, and cook for 25 minutes, or until all the water is absorbed. Turn off the heat and let stand covered for 10 to 15 minutes. Using a rice paddle or spatula, gently fold the mushrooms into the rice, bringing the bottom to the top and vice versa.
*Haiga is not a brand name or a variety like jasmine or basmati, but rather a degree of milling the rice kernel to remove the outer bran layer but retain the nutrient-rich germ, which shines on each kernel like a bit of pearl. I was raised on white rice, and I’ve always found brown rice to be dissatisfyingly granular and unyielding to sauces, sitting in them rather than melding with them. Haiga is the best of both worlds—distinct, flavorful and nutritious yet pillowy and absorptive. I buy the Tamaki brand of haiga rice. It’s delicious. Available at Japanese and Asian markets.
How to Make Onigiri
Once your rice has cool enough to handle, but is still warm, fill a bowl with lukewarm water and another dish with a small pile of salt.
Dip your hands in the water, stick one wet finger in the salt and rub your palms together to spread an even film of gritty salt across the surface. This ensures the rice won’t stick to your hands. Grab a baseball size clump of rice.
Position your hands with the rice between your palms, one hand below and one hand above, and rotate your hands perpendicular to one another. The fingertips of your top hand should touch the space between the thumb and pointer knuckle of the other hand. The fingertips of your bottom hand should touch the flesh between your pinky knuckle and wrist. Let the rice rest in the palm of your bottom hand. Gently squeeze your fingers towards the base of the palm. At the same time bend your top hand at the knuckles, keeping your fingers straight, into a right angle. These two actions together should begin to shape the ball into a triangular block, like the roof of a wood block set. Rotate the 3d block triangle so a new side is resting in your palm. Repeat the dual action of squeezing gently from the bottom to while shaping the top into a right angle. Rotate to the third side and repeat. You should now have a cute triangular onigiri!
To make more, repeat the water and salt trick before forming each rice ball. Wrap each in plastic wrap or a plastic bag or place inside a tupperware.
Rice balls taste best when kept outside of the fridge and eaten within one day but you can store them in your fridge up to a week or freezer for several months. Just be sure to reheat fully before eating.
Only when you’re ready to eat, pull out the nori. The nori is not a pleasant ocean flavor but protects your fingers from the sticky rice. Eat the onigiri before the nori goes limp.
Who knew sugar beets were such a critical wartime commodity? In 1943, the United States Beet Sugar Association declared that every time a sixteen-inch gun fired, one-fifth of an acre of sugar beets went up in smoke. The history of these camps is beautifully documented in a project called Uprooted.
No-No Boys were Japanese-American men who answered “no” to two questions on a government loyalty test administered to all detainees in 1943. Answering “yes” meant joining the military of a government imprisoning your family and possibly being sent to fight family members in Japan. No-No Boys were sentenced to two years in prison at Tule Lake, and many were ostracized after the war.
In 2011, I launched a collaborative project called the Oregon Mushroom Stories where making art became the mode of learning. It entailed myriad components: short videos of mushroom foragers, farmers, and educators; a little illustrated chapbook about common wild mushrooms in Oregon; a zoetrope sculpture, which is an early form of animation, to show how mushrooms grow; a community fair where people could meet some of my favorite mushroom people; and a meal I called the Mushroom, Mold, and Yeast Feast where chef Naoko Tamura, prepared courses each devoted to a mushroom. The project only lasted a few years, but it still lingers through the relationships I built.
Loved reading this article Lola. Read it while writing my midterm exam! Haha. Also made me hungry for matsutake onigiri ( which I have never had) and to go on mushrooming adventures with you!