#Which is deeply appreciated especially at the time when many young Japanese people connected to it

[demonoflight]

Digimon Adventure 02 Appreciation Challenge - Day 9

Day 9: Which family dynamic in 02 do you find the most interesting?

The Hida family dynamic is interesting because, as much as it’s determined by who is in the picture, it’s equally determined by who isn’t.

First of all, can I point out that Iori’s family is the only fully named family in 02? We don’t know the names of Daisuke, Miyako and Ken’s parents, but for the Hidas we get all of them. Grandpa Chikara, mother Fumiko, father Hiroki.

Iori comes from a rather traditional Japanese upbringing - his grandfather is a kendo master, his mother’s Japanese cooking is brought up several times (she’s apparently very good!), they even have a butsudan (Buddhist altar) in a room with tatami flooring. They pray to it and everything! Iori speaks in perpetual teneigo, or polite language, as expected of a boy raised in such a traditional environment. Additionally, Iori’s father and grandfather before him were also police officers. Thus, Iori’s strong sense of justice, and very black and white dichotomy of good and evil.

Iori loves and respects his family, and especially his grandfather - Chikara is the father figure in his life, not only teaching him kendo but also imparting wisdom to him on a regular basis. Fumiko, Iori’s mother, usually shows up in the context of Iori having to do something very important that he can’t talk about. When that happens, Chikara always bails him out, because it’s quite clear that it hurts Iori deeply to even think of lying to his mother. He has too much respect for his family to blatantly lie to them.

Part of Iori’s character arc is learning to open up to new possibilities, and evolving his sense of justice from its rigid form into something much more flexible and inclusive. This is something Chikara seems to have been actively working on throughout 02 - his lessons to Iori always emphasized that he should be true to himself and do what he feels is right, and also be flexible in heart and mind. Chikara obviously learned from his dealings with his son and his best friend how important this is. I think he was probably pleased that Iori chose his own path of upholding justice as a defense attorney.

And then there’s Hiroki. It’s amazing how a long dead guy can have so much presence in the lives of their loved ones. From the few silent flashback scenes you get of him, he seems like the kind of person that would light up a room with his presence, with that big encouraging smile and open laughter. And he was the kind of person to put himself between a person and a bullet to save their life at the expense of his own! No wonder he’s so missed, he was probably an amazing guy.

Even early on in the series, you can tell Hiroki’s absence weighs on Iori heavily - in episode 3, he cites his late father’s words as something he must follow (in that case, finishing a dreaded cherry tomato because he “shouldn’t waste food”). In the last arc, when faced with big moral dilemmas, he keeps asking himself, “What would father thing?” “Would Father do something like this?” “Would Father approve of what I just did?” Iori was a kindergartner when Hiroki died, and as such he doesn’t really know who his father was, really. He was just too young. He’s clinging to what little he can remember his father said, and tries hard to figure out what his father would think of him now.

I think that’s why he takes everything Chikara says so seriously and absolutely. No one in his life knows his father better than Chikara did; Chikara raised Hiroki, and taught him many of the lessons that he is now teaching Iori. In a way, to get an idea of what his father was like, he has to go through Chikara.

You’d think learning his father had a deep connection to the Digital World, something they both share, would make Iori obsess about his father even more. In episode 49, this knowledge does trap him in the illusion where he shows the Digital World to his father. But by this point, Iori has grown a lot. He has seen how clinging to the past can ruin a person. He knows he can’t show the Digital World to his father or ask him what he thinks about things. But he now knows he can introduce Armadimon to his mother, and he can work on understanding the people around him more and creating a better future. There are things in his life here and now that he can and should focus on. And that’s why, as much as it hurts, he is ultimately able to let go.

[lisalowefanclub]

Multiplicity and what identification and representation means to Us

Madeline: I don’t remember there being many cool, attractive, and overall desirable but not fetishized (bye yellow fever) representations of Asian people in mainstream media while I was growing up in the early 2000s. The Asian media I did consume was introduced to me by my dad, so you can imagine the kind of outdated and endearingly weird characters I was exposed to as a kid. Think blind Japanese swordsman Zatoichi or humanoid child robot Astro Boy, both of which originated in Japan around the 60s. As for celebrities, I occasionally heard people talking about Lucy Liu or Jackie Chan, but only as defined by their stereotypical Asian-ness. My point is that this kind of cultural consumption fell into one of two categories: that of obscurity, which suggests that cultural objects are created by Asians for Asians (bringing to mind labels like “Weeb” for Western people who love anime), or that of hypervisibility grounded in stereotypical exoticism. You’d be hard pressed to find a film that passes the Asian Bechdel test.I didn’t discover K-pop until coming to college when I became curious about who my white friends were fawning over all the time. Since then, it’s been really neat to see how K-pop has become popularized as one of the many facets of America’s mainstream music and celebrity culture, especially when artists write and perform songs in Korean despite the majority of their audience lacking Korean language fluency. This suggests that something about the music is able to transcend language barriers and connect people despite their differences. Today it’s not uncommon to see Korean artists topping Billboard’s hot 100 hits, being interviewed on SNL, winning American music awards, gracing the cover of Teen Vogue, or being selected as the next brand ambassador for Western makeup brands like M.A.C. If you were to ask your average high school or college student if they know Blackpink, BTS, or EXO, they would probably be familiar with one of the groups whether or not they identify as Asian.What does this mean, then, for young Asian-Americans to grow up during a time when Asian celebrities are thought to be just as desirable as people like Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, or Michael B. Jordan? What does it mean to see an Asian person named “Sexiest International Man Alive”, beating out long-time favorite European celebs? What does it mean for popularity to exist outside of the realm of the racialized minority and for it to build connections across minority cultures? Of course, fame can be toxic and horrible-- it is, at times superficial, materialistic, gendered, fetishized, and absolutely hyper-sexualized-- but I for one think it’s pretty damn cool to see people who look like me featured in mainstream American culture.I’ve found that throughout the semester, my understanding of Asian presence in America (American citizen or otherwise) has been deeply shaped by our discussions of identity politics and marginalization, another class I’m taking on intergenerational trauma, and my own identity as a Laotian-American woman. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the similarities between American proxy wars in Korea (The Forgotten War) and Laos (The Secret War), both of which involved US bombing of citizens in the name of halting communism. Taking this class has challenged me to reconceptualize how we make sense of mass atrocity in relation to a pan-Asian identity, especially when contending with how trauma and violence can act as a mechanism for cultural production, and I look forward to exploring this more in my thesis. 

Cyndi:  K-pop is always just the beginning. Enough in and of itself, any interest in the genre at all reinvigorates the consumer to become more engaged with the world in which it exists. Two years ago, I got into a big, but in hindsight pretty silly, argument with my mom when I started going to a Korean hair salon (because of my K-pop delulus / Jennie prints) instead of seeing Maggie, our Vietnamese hairdresser who I can usually only see twice a year on our bi-annual visits to California to visit extended family. My mom told me the Koreans don’t need our money, they are already richer than we will ever be. Who are ‘the Koreans’? Who is ‘we’?? Is every person of Korean descent doing better than every person of Vietnamese descent in America? And #why is my mom being A Hater? Surely, sharing our identity as ‘perpetual guests’ in America should create some sort of solidarity, or at least, allow for transitory economic collaboration??? I give my money to white people all the time: to McDonald’s (Cookie Totes), to Target, to Swarthmore College. 

K-pop cannot be the end. As much as I enjoy the music, the show, and the celebrities, I also know in my heart that the current international interest in K-pop will not last. As an almost perfect and perplexing exemplification of modern global capitalism, the industry will over-expand and thus wear itself out. I always see the subtle disappointment on my language teachers’ faces when they ask me how I came to take interest in Korean, and I have to answer ‘K-pop’, because that is the truth; that is not where I am at now, but it will always be how I began. It has become clear to me that this disappointment is not just a generational difference. Maybe these old people are jealous of pop stars like how I also have to question whether I am secure in myself when I see a 14 year old accomplishing things I as a 21 year old could never accomplish in my long life. I am coming to understand that part of their reaction comes from the fact that there is a fine line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation, that pop culture is ephemeral, but they have lived their lives as entirely theirs. Casual or even consuming interest for the parts of culture that are bright, and clean, and easy cannot ever stand in for true racial empathy, though it is where many of us start. Identity in K-pop is merely another marketing technique, but to the community of fans and lovers, it is something that is real, lived, and embodied. I find that looking at K-pop always brings forth my most salient identities in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. As much as female group members express affection and jokingly portray romantic interest toward one another, would it ever be accepted if these jokes were no longer jokes, but lived realities? Even if the K-pop industry itself did not seek to produce fan communities of this magnitude, these communities that have been founded in response to it are here to stay.  Lowe argues that “to the extent that Asian American culture dynamically expands to include both internal critical dialogues about difference and the interrogation of dominant interpellations” it can “be a site in which horizontal affiliations with other groups can be imagined and realized” (71). A recent striking example is Thai fans’ demand to hear from Lisa on the protests -- a primarily youth-led movement against the government monarchy--going on in Thailand. Although she is, of course, censored and silenced on this topic, the expectation is still there; fans are holding their idols to a standard of political responsibility. 

Jimmy: I haven’t really paid much attention to K-pop until working on this project. Sure, my cousins would do anything to go see BTS perform in person, but I didn’t care so much. Or maybe, I was just not saturated with the cultural zeitgeist. Whereas they live in the center of a cosmopolitan city which imports and exports, my hometown hums white noise. Increasingly, though, K-pop has entered into my life and the wider American cultural space. Now, K-pop tops the charts and is featured on late-night talk shows. Whether or not you are a devout follower, you have probably encountered K-pop in some form. It was not until I went to Swarthmore that I have “become” Asian American. Back home, my friends are primarily either white or Vietnamese-American. And even though I did recognize that I had an “Asian” racial identity mapped onto me, I did not consider it to be based on any politics. After engaging with and working within  Organizing to Redefine “Asian” Activism (ORAA) on campus, as well as taking this course, I have a better grasp of what it means to rally around an Asian American identity. It is a way to organize and resist. Reflecting on my political evolution, I feel comforted and alienated by the cultural weight of K-pop in America. It is amazing to see the gravity of cultural production shift away from the West. And to have global celebrities from Asia is great. Yet, K-pop is limited as a platform for Asian Americans to create identity. What are the consequences when mainstream ideas about contemporary “Asian” culture are still perpetually foreign from America? Is Asian American community just built around transnational cultural objects like K-pop and bubble tea? Does the economic and cultural capital of K-pop held by its idols obscure or erase the heterogeneity and multiplicity of Asian Americans? 

Jason: The first time I heard K-Pop was when Gangnam Style came on during a middle school social event when everyone is standing in their social circles doing their best not to be awkward when teacher chaperones are constantly staring at the back of your head seeing if any wrongdoing would occur. At that time, I could never imagine the K-Pop revolution that would occur within the American music industry.  Anytime I turn on the radio it is only a matter of time until a BTS song will start being blasted from the speakers. It is crazy to think that K-Pop has become so widespread within American popular culture that mainstream radio stations in Massachusetts are so willing to play K-Pop, even the billboards of 104.1 “Boston’s Best Variety” are plastered with BTS, because they know that is what their audience wants. Eight years ago, during that middle school social Gangnam Style was more about being able to do the dance that accompanied the song rather than the song itself. This has completely changed as more and more people are finding themselves becoming devout supporters of K-Pop. This class and project have continuously been pushing me out of my comfort zone by engaging in literature that I would never have read and discussions that I would never have imagined participating in. I have even listened to more K-Pop over the past couple of weeks than I had ever before in my life. I was impressed by myself when a song by BLACKPINK came on and the radio host said here’s some new music that I knew that the song was from their first album that came out around a month ago. I am grateful that I have been pushed out of my comfort zone and “forced (by having to actually do the homework)” to engage in the material of the class. Who knows how long this K-Pop fascination will last in American popular culture, but I am glad that I could be a part of it rather than letting it pass me by and staying within my comfortable music sphere of country, pop, and British rap.  

[katieusualthings]

The reason why Kimetsu no Yaiba (KnY) is so well received by the Japanese (as such a remarkable phenomenon)

Written by Vũ trụ 一１９九

Translated by Meownie

Proofread by Alice

Everyone knows that just in a short time, KnY has almost occupied the spotlight in all fields, everyone talks about it, the number of sale in goods and comics is enormous, both of them are sold out, etc.

Following my own curiosity with this phenomenon, as well as my existent love for the original work of Kimetsu no Yaiba (the manga), I dug into this issue because, in Japan, every trend has its own root.

Taking aside all the numbers of sale or whatever, which have been analyzed by a lot of people, as I’m not a data person, I will look into the content, the storyline and the core of this phenomenon in reference to many sources and comments about KnY coming from people in this country.

Many of you say that KnY is only at an average level compared to the manga/anime general standard. Then let me tell you what the extraordinariness that an ordinary series can do.

Apparently, there are always conflicting opinions, the Japanese community is no exception. However, the pro-KnY still grows bigger and there is no sign of softening. And here are some positive comments for the success of this series.

1. The anime is excellent in graphics, sound effects, the plot details are neatly arranged, easy to understand and heart touching

Cannot ignore the fact that the anime has built up the KnY’s success. Ufotable made the anime so excellent, especially in terms of visual and sound. It makes the story more approachable and the audience more empathetic to it.

The anime is a contribution to KnY’s greatest success. But many seem to be mistaken that only thanks to the anime did KnY succeed like that?

If the anime succeeds, viewers will be more interested and curious about the main storyline, so they will try to read the original manga. But if the manga was a trashy series, they could stop buying/reading it and just wait for the anime, right? So what is the reason behind the boom in the KnY manga sales until the beginning of this year, and its rankings which are always in the top 3 of WSJ magazine?

Sometimes ago, I did a research and presentation about the anime/manga industry along with the cultural reforms that contributed to the revival of the Japanese economy after the war. In that research, there was a detailed analysis of the connection between the original manga and the anime adaptation as a yin-yang relationship. They are all for the sake of the original publisher and the animation studio, so one will complement the other.

Manga is a product which only attracts a certain group of people, it is not so popular since there are homemakers, young children, the elderly, and people who are not fond of reading, those who do not find manga interesting. But anime is more universal and extensive, as you know, Japanese families often buy a TV to watch the news or to entertain on weekends. The anime is only about hearing and watching, so anyone can access it. When a manga is adapted to an anime, it brings the original closer to the people, and furthermore, hopefully, make it to the big screen.

On the other hand, the original manga is the base, the soul of the work, so readers feel more excited when waiting for each chapter be published in the magazine, waiting for the changes to be re-compiled each time for a new volume. So the manga contributes to increasing a large number of consumers. Of course, buying DVD-BD is definitely more expensive than buying the volume.

As a result, success is mutual support between manga and anime. And making an anime warmly-received is not that easy, the good base of the manga should be credited and vice versa.

I will talk more about the content of the original in the second reason. But initially, it is necessary to distinguish: not all good originals are well-received and vice versa. Everything’s got its relative value, in which context and timing play a role.

2. The charisma of the protagonist, Tanjirou, a young boy trying to save his sister; With a warm-hearted characteristic, his story is not about “revenge” but “restoration”

11 over 10 people being asked, answered that KnY’s success comes from the main character. This is yet another compliment to the editor who directed the way for KnY, Katayama-san, for orienting to make a more gentle, kind Tanjirou, eliminating the brute in the original portray.

Firstly, it is appropriate in this day and age to have a main character who is kind and gentle, which replaces for the old MC portray, who was noisy, hot-tempered and “brainless”. Secondly, it suits the plot that Croc-sensei wants to shape, a story about a boy finding a way to help his sister to be human back, about family love and values. A character who is kind-hearted, with a loving and protective care towards his sister, is more suitable for the readers. On the other hand, the story which does not turn to revenge, but to the path of helping the younger sister to be back to normal and the main character with his sympathy for the tragic fate of the demons makes the readers/audience impressed and pleased and feel like they’re saved and soothed as well.

Tanjirou takes the crown not only because of his kindness but also the determination and strong will, as he does not forgive the crimes committed by the demons. Yes, he is surely sympathetic to them but they all have to pay for their guilt. Therefore, our main character is always consistent from the beginning to the latest chapter and that personality has never wavered.

Not to mention, there is an indispensable point in the MC of WSJ, that they all constantly try their best and do not deny what they are given.

Tanjirou carries all of those points of a MC of WSJ but still reaches many different types of audiences. Lots of mothers want their children to watch KnY so they can show more love towards their families and younger sisters like Tanjirou does.

That is the greatest success of the series. And that’s the reason why the media team take the slogan “Japan’s softest slaying demon story” to PR KnY successfully everywhere.

3. The next detail making the manga a big hit is the consistency in story theme, which is “family”

As everyone knows, the shounen mangas in general and ones in the WSJ, in particular, all discuss the solidarity. But there is a theme in KnY which reaches the audience more easily and widely: “family”. This is the affection that almost everyone can receive and understand.

The modern social situation of Japan, an Asian country, where even though family love is appreciated, the family warmth have gradually disappeared. Children who reach the age of independence and are out of a parent’s guardianship are able to easily leave the country, live independently and rarely return to visit their family. Here in Japan, the proportion of the elderly, late marriage and single people is increasing sharply. The rate of living alone now in Japan is very high and alarming. So a series about love for parents and siblings in the family is like warmth for this cold society.

From an old man’s POV who are living here: “I feel wholesome and nostalgic of the days I spent with my family, feel warm when watching KnY, and how Kamado siblings protect each other.”

The elderly do not pay attention to whatever trend is, they just watch TV basically to enjoy good work and support it.

The family theme is easy to empathize and to be delivered, so even the kids can watch and enjoy it with their mom. There are some POVs from some mothers, telling that their little kids love KnY and hoping they love their family just like the characters in the story do.

Although the context in the story is dark, the path of the story, the way expressing the theme of Croc-sensei is easy to understand, which brings in the light in the darkness and makes the number of readers become more diverse, makes the work more popular and universal.

Tbh, KnY is still very “bright” compared to many series in Japan, so a lot of children can approach this manga. Moreover, there are many cute characters and details in the story.

4. The gap between characters makes a unique way in Gotouge-sensei’s character creation

The Japanese love the interesting dynamic, and they define it as “the gap”. The more surprising gap a character has, the more popular that character is. Briefly, it is, “not judging the book by its cover”.

The first example is the character has the same or sometimes, more popularity over the MC in Japan, Zenitsu. They don’t usually like noisy guys, but because Zenitsu is a cool character and has an interesting gap, which attracts readers. Apart from his noisy, cheerful behaviour,  he is a serious, thoughtful and experienced person who accepts pain and loss just like an adult.

Then there are countless characters with interesting gaps like Inosuke, Giyuu, and the Pillars. Crocs-sensei’s characters are not many, compared to a shounen series. But this is the mangaka’s intelligence to choose the strengths outshining the weakness. Although sensei does not create many characters, sensei has built the base for the character very well, for the impressive appearance of each one and makes the readers/audiences remember them deeply.

The proof of this success is that KnY goods are sold out with every character, from the most to least favourite.

5. The story is clearly set in the Taisho era, coming with its proportional design and architecture that makes the reader accessible

Taisho era is neither old nor new. The people witnessing the change in that era are still alive. But Taisho was the period of transition with the insecurities in the society. So the creation of a fantasy battle with the chaos between demons and people is extremely suitable for the Taisho era.

There are billions of reasons, like the previous parts, here would mention only main points. KnY is simply a normal series, but it is the ORDINARINESS that pulls out the EXTRAORDINARINESS and delivers those CLOSER to the readers. And this “extraordinariness” is not something that a so-normal series can do.

I love the welcoming spirit of the Japanese, they always appreciate new things, yet never forget to maintain and preserve the old ones.

Because it is a constant rule in development.

The same thing applies for the WSJ: increasing sales for the currently published series, at the same time discovering and boosting new titles. And the latter is more important than the former. But they still welcome new series that inherit such values in shounen genre, the magazine would develop the series open-heartedly if it is deserved.

I am also a fan of shounen and WSJ, I think KnY totally deserves the success it has achieved now.

I also hope it is kindly well-received because Kimetsu no Yaiba was made not to be a replacement, not to take any seats from any series. It is simply a shounen legacy in WSJ magazine. You would know that the spirit in shounen manga highly values this “inheritance” characteristic.

[kataibusaibiin]

Offering our voices to honor our ancestors

Protecting What is Sacred: Our land, Our water, Our hope for a better future 

 I preface this with an apology because these thoughts were scribbled in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep and thus this lacks the clarity I’d hoped for in sharing some of what’s been weighing so heavily on my heart. That said, some folks have nudged me to share some of these reflections and it felt important to start somewhere in voicing how my heart connects these dots. So, below are some meandering thoughts as I reflect on Obon and how it threads us together with our past, present, and future... and ultimately each other...

In less than a month, I will be returning again to my place of birth - my maternal ancestral homeland in Okinawa - to visit with family and friends and to pay my respects to those who came before us.  It’s been 2 years since my last visit and it will be the first time I am able to speak to my beloved grandmother in Uchinaaguchi -  one of Ryukyu/Okinawa’s indigenous languages which I’ve been studying - to thank her and share with her my ongoing studies here in Hawai’i as I continue working to record our family’s stories, deepen my appreciation and understanding of our indigenous Ryukyuan history and culture, and create resources to share with fellow Uchinaanchu/Okinawans living in the diaspora across the globe. My grandmother is 96 now and has been my trusty compass since as far back as I can remember - back to my earliest childhood memories in Okinawa. Her visits to see us once we moved to North Carolina are highlights of my youth. Even when we moved to the states and we were thousands of miles apart, I could still always feel her love and would sometimes look out across the ocean in the direction of Okinawa, trying to picture her and the rest of the family there, hoping that I too could cultivate the kind of love she shares which could be felt across time and space.

It is not coincidental that my upcoming trip to Okinawa next month was planned to coincide with Obon and, as such, will involve returning to my grandmother’s village in Kijoka, Ogimi where some of our family tombs (ohaka) are located. I have yet to find the words to express what it means to me to be able to revisit the same land where generations of my family have lived and where we continue to return, year after year, to offer prayers and gratitude for our village, our ancestors, and all the sacrifices they have made for us. It is something to treasure all the more since there are many who are unable to do so, especially since I know many in Okinawa whose family tombs were destroyed during WWII or were paved over for US military bases under US occupation in the aftermath of the war.

I remember before taking that trip back to Okinawa two years ago, my mom had told me on a number of occasions that visiting our family tombs to pay respects was something she had always wanted us to be able to do together. I was never able to line up the time and resources to return for Shimi but she’d made clear that the timing wasn’t even what was important - just that we made the time.  And I vividly remember when I finally had the opportunity to join my family to do so as an adult during that trip, time seemed to collapse onto itself. I could feel an overwhelming connection to the past, present, and future as a continuum extending well beyond the 5 generations of our family represented in the gathering that day.

One of my young nieces and I tidied up the area and altar together as other family prepared the offerings we brought.  As we did so, I recall my grandmother commenting how happy the rest of the family (meaning our ancestors) must be to see my niece Sawana and I there together, putting such love and attention to detail in cleaning and helping with preparations. Hearing this as a gentle breeze passed, it certainly didn’t feel like we were alone. After our prayers and offerings, we found a nearby spot to enjoy our family picnic. Sitting in a circle, I looked around at my family with the sweeping views of the ocean behind them and my eyes welled up with tears of joy as I laughed and we talked story, savoring the beauty of that moment and seeing it similarly reflected on their faces. As I think back on such moments, my hope is that each day, I find a way through actions to express how much I cherish these gifts of love, tradition, and hope for a better future that have been and continue to be passed forward through my family and communities.

As many of you know, my return to Okinawa two years ago was something I was apprehensive about in many ways - despite longing to return since I was little - and I am beyond grateful that it was ultimately a deeply healing and transformational experience. During this trip in August, I plan to return to Shuri were my grandfather’s family is from and offer prayers and gratitude for my grandfather’s family at their hakas too, in hopes of contributing towards intergenerational healing within my family. After all, the history and stories of my grandfather’s family are part of what motivates me to do some small part to preserve Uchinaaguchi and not only Ryukyu/Okinawa’s history and culture but also our family’s legacy as part of that living history.  (Some of you already know why I’ve not grown up close to that branch of our family but for others, suffice to say my grandmother is a strong, fiercely loving woman who would always stand up for what is best for her children...no matter the self-sacrifice involved.) I mention this because history is never clean - often filled with pain, conflict, and contradictions - but we shouldn’t shy away from certain parts of our past because of that; those parts shape(d) us too and can be part of how we learn, heal, and ultimately reclaim our futures.  This is true even of my father’s side of the family - direct descendants of both Reverend John Robinson “Pastor of the Pilgrims” who sent his congregation over on the Mayflower as well as the Mississippi band of Choctaw who were nearly wiped out by the arrival of these European immigrants. I often think about how to hold these complicated truths and seeming contradictions of our past and/or different perspectives and the importance of doing so even as we face such situations in the present...

To Honor My Ancestors Is to Honor All Our Ancestors

Here in Hawai’i, Obon festivities have already begun as there are literally bon dances held every weekend from mid June through August. To write about some of my experiences and reflections thus far (including the way Obon is celebrated here versus back in Okinawa) is a topic for another time. I share this as context though because as a member of the Young Okinawans of Hawai’i (YOH), we share our song, drumming, and dance as offerings to our ancestors and to communicate with them, just as Okinawan eisaa was traditionally intended for. It is not entertainment for the crowd that gathers but, if anything, an invitation for the community to join us in this collective offering for all our ancestors. Whether it’s the little ones that find their way towards the inner circle around the yagura to dance by our side during our bon dances or the young ones in my family and communities, I hope that any child I ever interact with can feel and cherish the gifts of our uyafaafuji (ancestors) and learn to manifest that gratitude with their voices and in their actions, guided by what’s in their hearts. I do not take lightly the moments like this weekend when a group of little kids surrounded me and looked up wided-eyed and open-hearted, eager to watch and follow in my footsteps as we sang and danced around the yagura together. When I heard one of the littlest ones next to me begin to join me as we called out with our heishi, I’m not ashamed to admit I got a little something in my eyes.

In sharing the history and meaning of Okinawan eisaa and inviting friends to join us for Bon dancing, I have found myself often clarifying for folks that when I say I dance and sing for “our ancestors” I am referring collectively to the people we are tied to through our connection to place as well as our families of origin which we are connected to through blood and other familial connections. So, when I sing and dance here in Hawai’i, I too sing for the kanaka maoli - the indigenous Hawai’ians and the Kingdom of Hawai’i. I am aware that in moving here to study and build community with the Asian plurality and fellow Uchinaanchu here, I am also a settler. So, I strive to listen and learn from not only the elders I meet but also to their ancestors who sought to protect this land and its precious resources.  That comes with inherent responsibilities to listen, learn, and take heart when I am asked to speak out as someone whose ancestral homelands were similarly colonized, whose people also endured physical and cultural genocide, and whose democratic voice and right to self-determination is still being ignored. As shimanchu whose past have so many parallels, I believe our hopes for a better future and collective liberation are also bound together. So too, I feel a deep responsibility as someone raised in the US and with the relative privilege that comes with that, even when so many Americans have made it clear that they will always see me as an outsider. It is all too clear to me how these things are all interconnected.

So, this weekend, I danced not only for my ancestors back in Kijoko but also for those in Henoko, Okinawa where my parents met and for the community there who have been dedicated to protecting our one ocean in the face of joint US-Japanese military construction in Oura Bay. My heart also joined the protectors here in Hawai’i who have been gathering at Mauna kea to prevent the desecration of that sacred land. I lit candles and held in my heart the memory of my paternal grandparents and their families. My heart too, also sang out for the children who are locked up in cages across the US for the crime of having a family who dreams of a better future for them but come from another side of an imaginary line.  I carried in my heart - the heart of a first-generation immigrant to the US - all the families of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants who are dreaming for a brighter future.

I might not have all the answers for how to re-envision the future to be a better one for all, but I’ve seen enough to know one thing we have to do is speak out to say that this current path we’re on sure isn’t the way. 

To honor my ancestors is to honor the preciousness of all life. Nuchi du takara. So, to honor all my ancestors, I offer my voice to honor the ancestors of all of us - to acknowledge our interconnectedness - and to share our ancestors hopes of a better future for us all. In sharing my voice as an offering, I also extend an invitation: Let us never give up the hopes and dreams of our ancestors. Instead, let that be what unites us as we protect what is sacred. 

Rise for Henoko! Aole TMT! Protect Our One Ocean! Kū Kia`i Mauna!  Never Again is Now!  Together, We Rise!

p.s. I recently shared this music video but felt it was apropos to share this song again here with a gentle request to take the few minutes to watch and reflect:

[heyglenny-blog]

Q&A with illustratai (Tai Yoshida)

Q: How and when did you discover you wanted to be an illustrator?

A: When I was little, I spent most of my time drawing and coloring, so my family really encouraged me to explore that. Since then, I haven't put my pencil down and that everyday practice and support from my family has really helped me to grow as a young self-taught artist. I wasn't interested in any subject except art and design classes in school. I also started working part-time at a restaurant when I was 17 and that made me realize... that I found so much freedom and self-appreciation in not working for someone!  

So when I had to decide what type of college/major I wanted, choosing an art school and pursuing a degree in Illustration - especially going freelance, so I can be my own boss and make my own money doing the one thing I love - just felt natural to me. I know freelance isn’t easy, but I’m determine to make it work!

Q: How did you figure out that using an app on the iPad Pro was the right way to go about creating your art? Are there other mediums that you mess around with?

A: I actually use an iPad Pro to draw because I was scared to commit to a professional Cintiq drawing tablet at the time! I'll definitely invest in a Cintiq in the future, but for now I’m quite comfortable with my iPad. Although, my personal con to drawing digitally is that ever since I switched to it, I unfortunately rarely ever use sketchbooks anymore and I miss that.  

Art school has really exposed me to work with different mediums I was never comfortable with like: ink, charcoal, watercolor, oil paints and gouache. My favorite class I've taken so far was a color class where I was taught to paint with gouache. I got accepted into my university's spring art show for that class' final painting assignment, which really made me fall in love with it. I plan to make some illustrations using gouache in the future.  

Q: What inspires you to create new pieces? How do you begin your creative process and how do you know when it's finished?

A: Most of my inspiration comes from women and fashion. I'm really influenced by ethical fashion, indie boutiques, anime, old films, and Japanese fashion magazines. Of course social media is a huge influence as well. My eyes are always moving and absorbing other artist’s work so I can improve my own.

This might sound extra, but I begin by getting ready and dressing up like I'm going out! I feel like I create my best work when I think I look good and confident. I then begin to think about the composition of the piece, then the colors, mood, and so forth.  

I honestly never know when a piece is finished. Even my current "finished" illustrations could have a few more touches. When I was younger, I would throw away so many drawings because I'd just hate how it looked the next day. It's like the feeling of looking at a nice selfie too long and then you start to see all these imperfections and then in the end you just don't like that selfie anymore. I'm never satisfied with my work but I know that's just my weird anxiety filled brain talking so in the end I just accept it.

Q: I love that the theme of your work revolves around girls. Is there someone specific that you base them on or is there a reason for this?

A: As an Asian American woman, I rarely (or never) saw myself in art or the media. My goal is to celebrate girls forever though my illustrations and draw real life women! The thought of one day bringing a bit of happiness, confidence or inspiration into a girl like me, who is vastly underrepresented, really lights a fire under me to keep creating. I deeply appreciate anyone who feels a connection or just likes the way my art looks though!

I sometimes draw friends or ig girls as practice, but I'd never sell it as a print or something without their permission. Other than those drawings, all other girls I illustrate are not based on real girls… but they could be real girls! (if you catch my drift.)

Q: Describe your art style in one word.

A: One word?! That's hard… maybe, “Vivid!”

Q: What is your favorite piece you've created and why?

A: My favorite piece is definitely my "Boss" girl. I was struck with inspiration after watching the film Akira and immediately drew her right after. She wears a periwinkle pullover with a crossed out pill logo smack dab in the center of her back. The fact that I didn't draw her face really lets the viewer and myself wonder what she looks like. She's quite mysterious. Plus the fact that she's positioned in a "front double bicep pose" (thank you,  HYPERLINK "http://bodybuilding.com/"bodybuilding.com) makes her give off a powerful and confident aura. I wanted her colors to be cute and bright to balance the striking pose. Her motto is "Even though I look cute, don't f**k with me." I literally want her to be my best friend. We'd stomp around the city in our black boots together and beat up any cat callers!

Q: What do you feel when you look at your pieces and what do you hope other people feel?

A: In real life, I have multiple anxiety disorders, so I often battle with negative and self-depreciating thoughts about me and especially - my work. This issue is quite debilitating for me because it often seems like all the hard work I do is for nothing or is just unnecessary. So I feel really proud of myself and genuinely happy when I look at my pieces. My girls are simultaneously the best parts of me and also everything I aspire to be. I hope other people can feel the same sense of joy when they look at my work.

Q: You have recently launched your work with Mori Hawaii - what a huge milestone, congrats! What are your goals for the future, as an artist and/or just a human being?

A: Thank you! It’s been a dream come true to be able to sell my work in one of my favorite stores on O’ahu!  

My #1 goal is to finish college and get my BFA in Illustration.  

In terms of my personal art career, I want to be more active on Instagram to get myself more exposure as an artist and also take more commissions.  

As a human being, I’m working on being more aware of how the things I buy are made. Instead of going for fast fashion, I’m purchasing clothes from ethical or local brands and thrifting. I’m also considering how much use I can get out of an item or if that item can go with many other pieces in my closet before purchasing. Just trying to make the world a better place one step at a time by being a smarter shopper.

Q: Who has inspired you the most?

A: My biggest art inspirations so far are definitely Hayao Miyazaki, Kelsey Beckett, Audra Auclair, and Leslie Hung. These artists never fail to push me to work harder at my craft.

Q: What advice would you give to someone who is in a creative block?

A: What really helps light a fire under me to draw is watching other people draw. I highly suggest watching speed-paints or drawing tutorials by your favorite artist. When it comes to being motivated, nothing beats seeing someone you look up to work hard! Aside from that, when I feel like I'm in an art block, walking around or just gazing out of the bus, train, or Lyft in San Francisco helps to open my eyes to new color schemes and settings for my girls.

Q: Lastly, what are three items you could not function without?

A: Not surprising but I could not live without my phone! It's how I connect with my loved ones, stay organized, and where I turn to for inspiration on-the-go. I'm on it all the time.

I can't live without a digital drawing tablet anymore! It really has changed my life and has brought out the best work in me. Technology is already taking over the world and the art industry, so I have to keep up.  

Lastly, I can’t function without dogs! I know they aren’t an item, but I think I’d go mad without them. There was never a moment where we were dog-less in my house. I have two little chihuahua’s waiting for me at home right now - who I absolutely adore. Being without them in San Francisco has caused me to have this urge to want to pet everyone’s dogs here. Literally catch me on the street creepily staring at someone’s dog.

Check out Tai's Instagram page:

instagram.com/illustratai

[bossladytae]

Which arc do you think best represent Gintama? Also, if you were to recommend any episode(s)/arc(s) to somebody who's never watched Gintama before, which would it be?

I don’t know if picking just one arc as a representative will suffice because another arc will deliver a different impact. I know it sounds like a cop-out, but it’s true – there are too many great arcs that embody the spirit of Gintama. 

But for the sake of your question, I’ll select five candidates. I hesitate to choose anything beyond Shogun Assassination arc because that was the point of no return and the arcs that followed are all interconnected and quite dark in comparison to the earlier arcs (minus Yoshiwara, which I feel is on par with them). It’s not that Gintama can’t be dark and depressing, but I think in order to choose a representative arc, there has to be a balance of comedy and drama with a final wrap-up at the end. The arcs after (and including) the Shogun Assassination arc are quite emotionally heavy and depend on each other for story continuation.

Continued under the cut (along with my answer to your second question): 

BenizakuraI know most people are tired of this arc, understandably so. I’ve seen/read it enough times already and had hoped the live action film would venture into original but Sorachi-approved/penned territory. Nevertheless, the Benizakura arc remains a vital part of Gintama for several reasons:

It’s the first arc in which the potential deaths of the Yorozuya are more real possibilities than ever before.

It introduces the main antagonists (although Takasugi is introduced early on), the Kiheitai, who will continue to have a significant presence in Gintama.

It is the first lengthy arc, surpassing three episodes/chapters.

It shares important information about Joui3, and, contrary to popular opinion, the Joui4 have always been an integral part of the story because of their connection with Gintoki, the main character.

Besides those reasons, I rather like how Benizakura’s subplot concerning the Murata siblings is introduced and wrapped up by the end with Gintama’s signature style of minor characters having more depth than first glance reveals. Their story and how Gintoki affects their lives serves as a prime example of the Yorozuya’s impact on everyone they encounter. Furthermore, this arc has the perfect balance of drama and comedy, which is why I consider it a candidate for best representative arc of Gintama.

Shinsengumi Crisis

My all-time favourite arc centered on my most favourite character, but I didn’t choose it for those reasons alone. I selected this arc because of the focus on the Shinsengumi as main, recurring characters while still having some focus on the Yorozuya. Additionally, this is an arc that centers on an antagonist who undergoes development and redeems himself by the end. We don’t really have that in the Benizakura arc except for Tetsuya, but he cannot really be compared to Itou and Bansai. Gintama is known for its antagonists rarely staying the same in an arc, and I think Shinsengumi Crisis is one of the best examples.

This is also one of those arcs where the Shinsengumi benefit from the Yorozuya’s assistance, but also don’t necessarily need them for character development, because they do that all on their own, for the most part, due to the strong bond between Shinsengumi members. The Yorozuya are partly there because Hijikata has requested for them to protect the Shinsengumi in his place (indicating his desperation for and devotion to the Shinsengumi, Kondou especially), and they do play a part in his breaking the curse, but beyond that, Kondou, Okita, and Yamazaki act on their own and, eventually, so does Hijikata. The primary focus is Itou, Hijikata, and the Shinsengumi and how they handle their own internal affairs.

Gintoki takes more of a side role in this, but returns to the main spotlight when he confronts Bansai and the inevitable link to Takasugi (who we know by now one of the main driving forces behind the series and someone deeply connected to Gintoki). Before that, they were charged to protect Kondou and then Hijikata, both on request, but, of course, nothing ever goes as planned. Gintoki, then, is given secondary reason to be in this arc when Bansai forces him to fight. After that, they are mainly observers helping in the best way they can for the greater good.

I don’t have anything else to add except that it makes a good standalone film, and evidently, the anime team thought so as well with the release of the film versions.

Ryugujo

This must seem like an odd choice given the fact that I rarely see it listed among fan favourites. It’s probably because none of the popular characters are in it save for Gintoki, Katsura, and Kagura (and even then, depending on which corner of the Internet you frequent, people don’t appreciate Gintoki and Katsura’s camaraderie as much, I find). While the arc’s plot is taken from Japanese folklore, the execution may seem a bit silly for some, but it’s in true Gintama-style.

Moreover, this is one of those arcs that doesn’t have any effect on the main, overarching plot line that I can discern, but that doesn’t make it less important. This is where people fail to distinguish between plot and character-driven stories, forgetting that Gintama is a mix of both and insisting that this arc or that character is unimportant (talk about missing the entire point of Gintama) to the story as a whole. Sorachi tells these stories for a reason and the reason in the Ryugujo arc is a lesson on true beauty. It’s a simple lesson, yes, but one that still needs to be taught time after time, because humanity still prioritizes the condition of their face over their soul. It’s only natural, but the Ryugujo arc emphasizes that you will have everlasting beauty if your soul is untainted, whether you’re young or old. Appearances change and fade, but your actions and words will have a longer and stronger impact on people and life in general.

Gintama is, essentially, a series of lessons and morals (as evident by chapter and episode titles that aren’t adages) and choosing to do the right/best thing, whatever the situation is. We see this constantly, especially through Gintoki as he strives to live the best, most peaceful life in a post-war era. For example, in this arc alone, they all could have left Otohime to her fate after what she did to them, but they didn’t; they fought to save her and give her another chance at life. Taking the higher road is a noble deed, and in doing so, they freed a person’s soul from its own cage. Thus, Otohime can live her life unburdened and age gracefully with true beauty behind her smile.

Therefore, I think the Ryugujo arc is one of the best examples of Gintama’s lesson-oriented stories that also gives the rest of the cast a chance to shine.

Courtesan of a Nation

This is an arc that plays a larger role in the overarching plot, but can still stand on its own without the next arc needing to play sequel for it. This arc uses more of the newer characters, like Tsukuyo, Isaburo, Nobume, and Oboro. It reveals more of Gintoki’s past. There’s action and comedy at the right moments. Lastly, like its predecessors, there are minor characters whose personal stories will draw you in, and I’ve got to say – the one featured in this arc gets me every time when the ending credits roll into view with that SPYAIR song.

Overall, this arc really has the atmosphere of an epic and tragedy all at once. There is real danger presented, as they grapple with government factions this time around: authoritative figures with the power to damage your reputation, destroy your career, or have you executed. When you start messing around with the higher-ups, it isn’t going to be easy to walk out the door unscathed.

This arc also brings to light the many conspiracies and treason-laced schemes that tie back to Gintoki more than one initially thought – and certainly more than he wanted it to. It’s easy to forget that Gintoki is a war veteran and considered, by the current government, a national criminal, as well, for his part with the Jouishishi. He is as much a wanted man as Katsura and Takasugi are.

Lastly, it’s an arc that shows nothing will stop the Yorozuya and their allies from doing what they perceive to be the right thing. It’s exciting to watch people who don’t normally work together do just that: the Shinsengumi, the Mimawarigumi, the Hyakka (Tsukuyo), and the Yorozuya. They all have a common goal in mind and view Shige Shige as the better and more just Shogun.

Kabukichou Four Devas

Finally, I would choose the Four Devas arc as a candidate for best representative arc because it’s a story of people from all walks of life coming together to protect what’s important to them. And that’s Gintama in a nutshell. Several arcs after this one, Gintoki speaks of gaining thousands of allies and this is where we see many of those allies first come together as a single force well before the Shogun Assassination and Silver Soul arcs. It is comprised of characters we meet in the first fifty episodes alone (including some from later on). It shows that people have not forgotten what the Yorozuya have done for them, and they want to give back in whatever way they can. It shows that Gintoki and the Yorozuya are not alone in the battle to save the Kabuki district as part of Otose’s faction.

Indeed, it also focuses on Otose, her past, and her bond with Gintoki. Most of the time, Otose is just in the background, rarely in the spotlight but always there at important moments when she needs to be. But here, she plays a key role as we are introduced to Jirochou and Pirako, plus the reintroduction of Saigou and Kada. Additionally, at the end of the arc, there is a brief story line with Takasugi and Kamui, which is crucial for the remainder of Gintama, as the Kiheitai and Harusame alliance will later prove.

Overall, it’s a great arc for showcasing the strength and bonds of multiple characters, major and minor. As stated by Gintoki himself in the Kintama arc:

“The main character of Gintama is every last idiot alive in this show!”

Now for the second part of your question: which arcs/episodes would I recommend for newcomers?

Well, it’s something I’ve wrestled with for over ten years: how do I get people into Gintama? People have watched those infamous first two episodes and ditched it. Others think it’s just comedy, parodies, and gags with no substance. The reality is that some people just won’t be able to understand what Gintama is, won’t come to love it as much as we do.

I’ve learned to accept that. I pity them; I feel sorry that they miss out on superb storytelling that leaves many other WSJ series in the dust. I think they’ve made a big mistake and are generally wrong about everything they perceive Gintama to be…but that’s their choice. No matter what I say or recommend, it won’t be enough for the newcomer, because they’re going to judge it by their own standards and decide if they want to continue or not, regardless of how much I hype the series up.

I can’t really recommend the serious arcs yet because they would be walking right into the middle of a story without really knowing anyone. Jokes will feel like inside jokes. They might find themselves constantly referring to a character chart to remember names, faces, and reasons for why they are way they are. They’ll miss little details that come into play later. Yet, I also hesitate to recommend just a single episode or comedy-centric arcs, because then the newcomer will judge Gintama by those alone and miss out on the equal quality of the drama arcs.

I think the first two episodes can be freely skipped for later viewing. Strictly speaking about the narrative, it is too much to introduce a ton of characters at once; it overwhelms the viewer, as they scramble to memorize everybody. Starting at episode 3, which is chapter 1 of the manga, is a better idea. One may also utilize a filler list to avoid those, but you can barely tell which is filler material or not.

However, in the end, I have to say…just watch it.

Watch it and understand that the comedy makes Gintama as much as the drama does. There’s no need to place either one on a pedestal. All the episodes leading up to the first serious arc and the ones that come in between can be just as worthwhile. Gintama has an overarching plot, but it’s also a slice-of-life series in that it doesn’t limit itself to common tropes of a shounen series. You can’t narrow it down to a single genre, either, because it has everything (although some by parodies). There are great comedic and dramatic moments in every episode, and in order to appreciate the rich diversity of the characters, it’s best to just take Gintama as it is.

And, honestly, you have a list of episodes available on several web sites with brief summaries. You can choose what you want to leave for later and focus on what sounds like it’ll be hilarious or extra interesting for you. I just don’t recommend watching the serious and longer arcs out of order, because they reveal necessary information for subsequent arcs.

Once I was a newcomer, too. I didn’t know what I was getting into except that I liked the style of comedy presented by early chapters of the manga. I took my time watching the anime, never knowing what was ahead within the serious arcs, that Gintama would grip me emotionally like few series have. I don’t like to call it patience here, because the fact that I watched every single episode doesn’t mean I was waiting for it to “get good,” as many people say and ask. To me, Gintama already WAS good. It was something different from the usual shounen fare. I didn’t need to wait at all, and before I realized it, I was already heavily invested in the characters that I loved seeing them in all kinds of situations.

Plus, I think today people have shorter attention spans with a desire for instant gratification – so much that they forego story build-up, wanting to get to the action quicker or whatever it is they’re looking for. There’s little appreciation for the art of storytelling nor all its subtleties (something Sorachi does in spades).

Gintama isn’t 500+ chapters or 300+ episodes of endless quests and final bosses and power-ups. If you want that, go watch/read something else. But if you want unique and developed characters, a female cast that’s treated with more respect than other series, hilarious comedy, historical parallels, and intriguing drama plots, then embrace Gintama and all its quirks. You won’t regret it. I certainly don’t. There’s a reason Gintama is consistently highly rated across a number of different web sites and ranking systems. Take my word for it.

[theparaminds]

It’s common for music to be associated, at a base level, to emotion. While true that sound attaches to the idea, it is a step further to explore spirituality, and therefore the life’s intricacies as a whole, through vibrations. This is exactly the new step Umi is introducing to the listening world, building spaces of introspection as well as understanding. 

While young, she uses her life and surroundings to explain much of what doesn't seem to have an answer. Her sounds are beautifully simplistic, yet deeply resonating with every note as they fill the mind with endless memories. In truth, her music makes us nostalgic for things to come. 

With each passing day, her own personal knowledge and self connections become larger and stronger, more honest and hopeful. Ultimately, putting it towards a positive energy rare within music, but one so deeply appreciated. Umi is, in a sense, creating the musical embodiment of love, fear, defeat, laughter, and truly, the human experience.

Our first question as always, how’s your day going and how have you been? 

My day’s been going great! I’m on the plane right now headed to New York. I’ve been doing amazing, life is beautiful! 


To take it to the start, when did you originally find yourself caught by the idea of pursuing music? Who or what around you pushed you onto the path you’re currently on?

I feel like I’ve always wanted to be a musician, I literally couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else. I’ve been writing songs since I was 4 and remember putting on little concerts for my mom and sisters. I don’t think one moment or event pushed me to do music, but growing up in a musical household and having friends who did music definitely encouraged me to pursue my passion. 

Artistically, who were the artists that you found yourself drawing from, and how do you contrast those early influences to the ones you hold now?

I’ve been really inspired by artists like SZA, Frank Ocean, Jhene Aiko, and Benny Sings and found a lot of inspiration in their lyricism. I would say in the past I was more inspired by genres of music (R&B, gospel, alternative, pop) rather than a specific artist, which is why I feel I was able to understand and develop my own sound. But finding inspiration in artists over the past few years has helped me to improve the way I write from a lyrical standpoint.

Do you find the roots that you grew up from helped shape who you are as an artist?

I definitely think so! I grew up in a very musical household so creating music became second nature to me. My mom was a pianist, my dad played the drums, my aunt is a blues singer, and literally, everyone else in my family sings or plays an instrument. There was always music playing in my house and because I’m both Black and Japanese, I grew up listening to lots of different types of music (from gospel to R&B to Japanese pop to Korean music). I think that’s what has allowed me to come up with the melodies that I do now and to feel comfortable making different types of music. I also grew up in Seattle. It rains there ALL THE TIME. I think the gloomy weather and all the nature might also be where certain aspects of my sound subconsciously developed from. 


Beyond artists, you also have an interesting passion for astrology and similar forms of personal spirituality. Where would you say this came from and how has it lent itself to your music and understanding of yourself?

I’m not an expert on astrology so I can’t claim to that passion yet, but I am very passionate about spirituality. My mom has always been very spiritual but she never pushed her ideas onto me; I think she always knew it was something for me to discover on my own. I remember right before I moved to LA, I stumbled across this random YouTube video on the Law of Attraction (I definitely think the universe wanted me to watch it). That video shifted the way I saw the world. Since then, I’ve just been constantly reading, writing, meditating, and listening in order to learn more about my own spirituality. Spirituality to me is all about enhancing your self-awareness and understanding the power of your mind! Everything is energy, and whatever frequency your vibrate at reflects the people and circumstances that are attracted to you. When I began to understand this, my life changed! 

To those who may not understand or question reasons to practice these forms of spiritually, what would be your message and answer to their confusion? 

I think a lot of people stop themselves from being happy and truly fulfilled by holding onto learned ways of thinking. I think society teaches us that life is supposed to be hard and sad and full of discontent and so people become identified with this mindset. We think that happiness is difficult so we attract difficult situations, bad people, and unfortunate circumstances into our life. It’s a cycle. Happiness and belief in abundance is innate, you can see that in the way babies look at the world, they don’t fear anything! Life is limitless. Spirituality — or enhanced/deeper self-awareness — allows you to reconnect with this innate understanding you may have lost through living in an unconscious society. When you realize that life is meant to be happy, and easy and fun you attract happy people, positive circumstances, and abundance back into your life. Through practices like meditation, self-reflection etc you realize what traumas in your life may have caused you to hold negative beliefs of the world. This then gives you the power to release your past, let go of your perceived sense of self, and reconnect with the real essence of you! It’s beautiful! I know it’s the reason my music finally started to grow. Literally, every single affirmation I say to myself comes true now. I’m so powerful!  

As well, you’re fantastically vocal about the current political and social situations that matter most to you, even expressing them musically with songs like Dear Donald Trump. Do you hope to continue using your music and artistry as a vehicle for change and why, for you, is it essential to remain expressive as a youth through such turbulent times? 

Yes, as my platform begins to grow, my voice will only grow louder. It’s so important for me to use this opportunity to shed light on various social issues and stand up for what I believe in. I want to become an advocate for change especially for issues regarding woman of color, police brutality, reproductive rights, and immigration. I’m still constantly learning myself, so I hope as I get older and have more resources, I can find even better ways to enact change both through music and outside of music. 

You’ve said yourself that it’s been a really positive past year for you, in all facets of life, but if you could pinpoint one memory which sticks out above the rest, which would it be and what is its significance?

There have been so many fulfilling memories this year (so many happy tears!) but the one that sticks out to me the most is when my video “Remember Me” hit 1 million views. It was such a surreal moment for me. I’ve made so many videos in the past that I hoped would reach a million views and every time it didn’t I would get discouraged. When this happened, it all made sense. I realized that nothing in the past was supposed to gain the views that “Remember Me” did. It was confirmation to me that everything was happening exactly the way it was meant to be, when it was meant to be. More than anything, I was just really proud of myself and deeply grateful for all the people who helped me get to where I am. 


As we stand at the beginning of a, hopefully, positive new year, what goals and plans do you hold? What projects or ideas do you hope to work on or execute? 

1. Release more music! Release a few projects! 2. Release more music videos3. Collaborate with more artists 4. Go on tour! See the world! And headline my own tour! 5. Perform at some festivals 6. Self-direct my own music video 7. Meditate more, read more, share love, express more gratitude 8. LOVE MYSELF! 9. Start weight lifting, or boxing.

Recently, you began to explore collaboration more with songs like Lullaby. Is this an experience you hope to continue pursuing? And, if you could collaborate with one living or dead artist, who would it be?

I have lots of exciting collaborations in the works right now that I’m excited to release! And I can’t wait to continue to collaborate with more artists. My dream is to collaborate with SZA and Jhene Aiko one day! I’ll manifest it. 


If you could recommend one movie, book or show to everyone reading this currently, which would it be?

I think everyone in the world should read “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle and listen to the podcast series Oprah did with him about the book! It changed the way I see the world! Also, listen to Oprah’s "Super Soul Sunday" podcast. It’s such a great way to challenge your mind and shift your perspective about life. Also, watch the movie “Mr. Nobody” it still has me thinking about the concept of time and life. 


Do you have anyone or anything to shoutout or promote? The floor is yours!


Follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook @whoisumi, check out my website whoisumi.com, and stream my music on all streaming platforms!! I have lots of new music on the way. 

[63824peace]

Saturday, 29th of october 2005

Nasu has a foul temper this morning. The weather is awful.

Rain wasn't supposed to fall today according to the weather forecast, but it did anyway.

All of my conference meetings have ended at last. I finally have time to enjoy the day's recreational events. The Autumn Leaves of Nasu Festival happens today. We could have used some better weather for it.

Fog obscures and blanches the autumn leaves' colors. White leaves overlap the red leaves, and only white remains.

We salvaged the Rice Cake Making Event by moving it to a new location. We're all supposed to participate in this event and make rice cakes according to the traditional methods.

Hideo participated too! I tried to keep a steady pace while pounding rice cakes out of steamed rice. It's pretty tough keeping up with professional rice cake makers though.

We finished the rice cakes.

"Let's eat this with our favorite toppings: ground black sesame seeds, kinako, bean jam, grated Japanese radish, and natto."

My attention was so immersed in making rice cakes that I hadn't noticed the appearance of several new stalls. I saw that stalls had been prepared for Ramen, Oden, and Kenchin-jiru.

Kenichiro and Okamura slept deeply while I enjoyed these festivities. They didn’t budge from the karaoke machines last night! I had parted from them and returned to my room earlier in the evening. It looks like I made the right choice.

I exercised a little bit of self-control and omitted a certain photograph from this blog entry.

Rice cake making resumed once again! Everyone joined the pounding.

Nasu's weather returned to a better mood around noon. The world returned to its former beauty when the rain cleared. The sky smiled only moments after it had stopped weeping. Nasu became a newborn infant.

I decided to walk around some of the nearby areas when my stomach got full. Mr. Muraoka and Okamura joined me.

The three-day conference concluded with a horseback archery event.

I owe a large amount of gratitude to many people as usual: the administration, the management department, and the campus staff. Thank you so much everyone. I appreciate everything greatly.

A game developer's true work lies in entertaining people. In that sense, we are accustomed to making people happy. Our position reverses every time we come to Nasu though. We are always the ones made happier.

They really treat us with heartfelt care and ensure our satisfaction.

Nasu's Autumn Leaves Festival captivated us with its beauty, yet the event staff's attention to service also dazzled us. They were superb ; an excellent support staff. They slipped in and out of events without calling attention to their presence. They became as slick and inconspicuous as the shadows of those who they supported. Suffice to say, all this is easier said than done.

No one has a universal manual with directions that explain how to ease a person's heart and mind. People are genuinely hard to please and entertain. Everyone is different, including the audiences who we face when developing our games. Tastes, hobbies, and preferences differ between each person. We all react with different emotions. Our work must meet the gamut of personalities.

I am always impressed by the environment and procedure of this conference. Today's event was especially marvelous though. They acted with excellent speed, decisiveness, and flexibility, but their heartwarming hospitality stuck out the most.

The unfortunate weather didn't even faze them. They moved forward with a back-up plan that still succeeded to surprise and entertain us. We were greatly pleased. Their hospitality was most evident through their magic shows, balloon art, and cosplay performances. That was real entertainment.

I enjoyed myself fully despite the rain. In fact, I believe that I owe even the rain a bit of thanks too. It caused the things that pleased me most: what it revealed about our hosts' abilities, and Nasu's transformation from rain to shine.

The event staff waved after us while our bus left for the train station. They waved until we couldn't see each other anymore. They truly reminded me of the value of true hospitality. They provided irreplaceable, priceless support.

A video game is a type of service too. We offer our gaming audience a digital variant of hospitality.

I swore an oath as I left Nasu. "I must make a good game!" I swore my oath so that I would remember these feelings.

A thought occurred to me on the bus. Nasu's event staff was more entertaining and hospitable than my development staff! Perhaps I could make a game with the event staff instead. I bet that we could make something good and entertaining.

I slept soundly as the bus arrived at the Nasu-Shibara station. We really were in the thick of the tourist season. People packed the station, and many cars filled the rotary.

I looked toward the station's souvenir shop when I exited the bus. I saw something sparkle inside. How surprising! Sparkle-Badges were displayed in the shop, even though they hadn't been there two days earlier!

The stock was smaller than the number on sale three weeks ago. Still, there's no doubting that these were the same items. The tourists coming into town to see the autumn leaves must have bought out the store's stock before. I couldn't miss this opportunity.

I chose a white guitar model out of the many Sparkles available.

"I'll take this please!"

A young woman working in the store said, "All right! Let me check and make sure that it works correctly.

She pulled one from the inventory. She thoroughly and kindly explained how to change the batteries, how to make it sparkle, and how to wear the badge. She even wore it on her jacket as a demonstration before she was through.

I was really glad that someone took such care to explain something thoroughly and carefully. Hardly anyone takes time these days to explain a product's operation like she did, not even in high-tech electronics stores. Those clerks won't give a decent answer even if they're asked directly.

A shopkeeper's spirit penetrates a customer's thoughts. Herein lies the charm of a small business. They take the time to explain even cheap merchandise thoroughly. I could intuit the pleasure that she received from selling goods, and in this way I could share her work's pleasure. This is another variant of hospitality.

I felt good about the whole experience.

"Is she the same saleswoman who I saw three weeks ago?" I asked myself. She certainly showed a similar passion for her work. I checked my diary notes to read what I had written three weeks ago.

I noticed that I had written this: "I stared at the badges and then my eyes connected with those of an old woman who worked in the shop. She explained that dead batteries could be replaced with new ones in this particular model."

An old woman? Wait a second!

Let me correct something: she is not an old lady, but rather a young woman. I had observed and remembered people through a private veil of negativity that day. I consequently recorded the saleswoman as an old lady. Yet she appeared as a young woman today because I received such warm hospitality.

I finally had my hands on Nasu's local specialty, the Sparkle-Badge! I triumphantly mounted the train platform. Matsuhanan had been watching me while I was in the souvenir shop. He called me to his side.

"You bought one of those badges too, Director?"

"Matsuhanan . . . you have one?"

"Yes, I bought mine in Roppongi Hills."

What!? So this means that they can be purchased anywhere!

We took the Nasuno248 train back to Tokyo.

I switched on my Sparkle-Badge inside the Shinkansen bullet train. The Sparkler bought in Nasu lit up our little traveling Nasu ; the Nasuno248.

I passed the time in the Shinkansen listening to HIM's album And Love Said No: Greatest Hits 1997-2004. I almost cried when I listened to the track titled In Joy and Sorrow.

Something occurred to me as I listened to the track's lyrics. Both the title and the lyrics could serve as a theme song for the relationship between The Boss (Joy) and The Sorrow.

Night had fallen when we arrived at the Hills. Everything was totally dark. The Subsistence and MGA2 teams are peaceful and calm, which is typical for the final development phase.

They seem OK, but I can't let them relax just yet. We'll have trouble if our staff members start flitting away like autumn leaves. Okamura is passing out large sized poporon (only available in Nasu) to the team members.

I took care of documents pending my approval and other paperwork. I had left these items alone when I put priority on my conference in Nasu.

I took my luggage for three days and two nights home. I'll head there to sleep early tonight.

[katebushwick]

Indeterminacy has a rich legacy in human appreciation of mushrooms.

American composer John Cage wrote a set of short performance

pieces called Indeterminacy, many of which celebrate encounters with

mushrooms.1 Hunting wild mushrooms, for Cage, required a particular

kind of attention: attention to the here and now of encounter, in all its

contingencies and surprises. Cage’s music was all about this “always different”

here and now, which he contrasted to the enduring “sameness”

of classical composition; he composed to get the audience to listen as

much to ambient sounds as composed music. In one famous composition,

4'33", no music is played at all, and the audience is forced to just

listen. Cage’s attention to listening as things occurred brought him to

appreciate indeterminacy. The Cage quotation with which I began this

chapter is his translation of seventeenth-century

Japanese poet Matsuo

Basho’s haiku, “matsutake ya shiranu ki no ha no hebari tsuku,” which

I have seen translated as “Matsutake; And on it stuck / The leaf of some

unknown tree.”2 Cage decided that the indeterminacy of encounter was

not clear enough in such translations. First he settled on “That that’s

unknown brings mushroom and leaf together,” which nicely expresses

the indeterminacy of encounter. But, he thought, it is too ponderous.

“What leaf? What mushroom?” can also take us into that open-endedness

that Cage so valued in learning from mushrooms.3

Indeterminacy has been equally important in what scientists learn

from mushrooms. Mycologist Alan Rayner finds the indeterminacy of fungal growth one of the most exciting things about fungi.4 Human bodies achieve a determinate form early in our lives. Barring injury, we’ll never be all that different in shape than we were as adolescents. We can’t grow extra limbs, and we’re stuck with the one brain we’ve each got. In contrast, fungi keep growing and changing form all their lives. Fungi are famous for changing shape in relation to their encounters and environments. Many are “potentially immortal,” meaning they die from disease, injury, or lack of resources, but not from old age. Even this little fact can alert us to how much our thoughts about knowledge and existence just assume determinate life form and old age. We rarely imagine life without such limits—and when we do we stray into magic. Rayner challenges us to think with mushrooms, otherwise. Some aspects of our lives are more comparable to fungal indeterminacy, he points out. Our daily habits are repetitive, but they are also open-ended, responding to opportunity and encounter. What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motions over time? Such indeterminacy expands our concept of human life, showing us how we are transformed by encounter. Humans and fungi share such here-and-now transformations through encounter. Sometimes they encounter each other. As another seventeenth-century haiku put it: “Matsutake / Taken by someone else / Right in front of my nose.”5 What person? What mushroom? The smell of matsutake transformed me in a physical way. The first time I cooked them, they ruined an otherwise lovely stir-fry. The smell was overwhelming. I couldn’t eat it; I couldn’t even pick out the other vegetables without encountering the smell. I threw the whole pan away and ate my rice plain. After that I was cautious, collecting but not eating. Finally, one day, I brought the whole load to a Japanese colleague, who was head over heels in delight. She had never seen so much matsutake in her life. Of course she prepared some for dinner. First, she showed me how she tore apart each mushroom, not touching it with a knife. The metal of the knife changes the flavor, she said, and, besides, her mother told her that the spirit of the mushroom doesn’t like it. Then she grilled the matsutake on a hot pan without oil. Oil changes the smell, she explained. Worse yet, butter, with its strong smell. Matsutake must be dry grilled or put into a soup; oil or butter ruins it. She served the grilled matsutake with a bit of lime juice. It was marvelous! The smell had begun to delight me. 48 Interlude Over the next few weeks, my senses changed. It was an amazing year for matsutake, and they were everywhere. Now, when I caught a whiff, I felt happy. I lived for several years in Borneo, where I had had a similar experience with durian, that marvelously stinky tropical fruit. The first time I was served durian I thought I would vomit. But it was a good year for durian, and the smell was everywhere. Before long I found myself thrilled by the smell; I couldn’t remember what had sickened me. Similarly, matsutake: I could no longer remember what I had found so disturbing. Now it smelled like joy. I’m not the only one who has that reaction. Koji Ueda runs a beautifully trim vegetable shop in Kyoto’s traditional market. During the matsutake season, he explained, most people who come into the store don’t want to buy (his matsutake are expensive); they want to smell. Just coming into the store makes people happy, he said. That’s why he sells matsutake, he said: for the sheer pleasure it gives people. Perhaps the happiness factor in smelling matsutake is what pressed Japanese odor engineers to manufacture an artificial matsutake smell. Now you can buy matsutake-flavored potato chips and matsutake-flavored instant miso soup. I’ve tried them, and I can sense a distant memory of matsutake at the edge of my tongue, but it’s nothing like encountering a mushroom. Still, many Japanese have only known matsutake in this form, or as the frozen mushrooms used in matsutake rice or matsutake pizza. They wonder what the fuss is all about and feel indulgently critical toward those who go on and on about matsutake. Nothing can smell all that good. Matsutake lovers in Japan know this scorn and cultivate a defensive exuberance about the mushroom. The smell of matsutake, they say, recalls times past that these young people never knew, much to their detriment. Matsutake, they say, smells like village life and a childhood visiting grandparents and chasing dragonflies. It recalls open pinewoods, now crowded out and dying. Many small memories come together in the smell. It brings to mind the paper dividers on village interior doors, one woman explained; her grandmother would change the papers every New Year and use them to wrap the next year’s mushrooms. It was an easier time, before nature became degraded and poisonous. Nostalgia can be put to good uses. Or so explained Makoto Ogawa, the elder statesman of matsutake science in Kyoto. When I met him, he Smelling 49 had just retired. Worse yet, he had cleaned out his office and thrown away books and scientific articles. But he was a walking library of matsutake science and history. Retirement had made it easier for him to talk about his passions. His matsutake science, he explained, had always involved advocacy for both people and nature. He had dreamed that showing people how to nurture matsutake forests might revitalize connections between city and countryside—as urban people became interested in rural life, and villagers had a valuable product to sell. Meanwhile, even as matsutake research could be funded by economic excitement, it had many benefits for basic science, especially in understanding relations among living things in changing ecologies. If nostalgia was a part of this project, so much the better. This was his nostalgia too. He took my research team to see what once was a thriving matsutake forest behind an old temple. Now the hill was alternately dark with planted conifers and choked with evergreen broadleaf trees, with only a few dying pines. We found no matsutake. Once, he recalled, that hillside was teeming with mushrooms. Like Proust’s madeleines, matsutake are redolent with temps perdu. Dr. Ogawa savors nostalgia with considerable irony and laughter. As we stood in the rain beside the matsutake-less temple forest, he explained the Korean origin of Japanese regard for matsutake. Before you hear the story, consider that there is no love lost between Japanese nationalists and Koreans. For Dr. Ogawa to remind us that Korean aristocrats started Japanese civilization works against the grain of Japanese desire. Besides, civilization, in his tale, is not all for the good. Long before they came to central Japan, Dr. Ogawa related, Koreans had cut down their forests to build temples and fuel iron forging. They had developed in their homeland the human-disturbed open pine forests in which matsutake grow long before such forests emerged in Japan. When Koreans expanded to Japan in the eighth century, they cut down forests. Pine forests sprung up from such deforestation, and with them matsutake. Koreans smelled the matsutake—and they thought of home. The first nostalgia: the first love of matsutake. It was in longing for Korea that Japan’s new aristocracy first glorified the now famous autumn aroma, Dr. Ogawa told us. No wonder, too, that Japanese abroad are so obsessed with matsutake, he added. He ended with a funny story about a Japanese American matsutake hunter he met in Oregon who, in 50 Interlude a badly garbled mixture of Japanese and English, saluted Dr. Ogawa’s research, saying, “We Japanese are matsutake crazy!” Dr. Ogawa’s stories tickled me because they situated nostalgia, but they also drove home another point: matsutake grows only in deeply disturbed forests. Matsutake and red pine are partners in central Japan, and both grow only where people have caused significant deforestation. All over the world, indeed, matsutake are associated with the most disturbed kinds of forests: places where glaciers, volcanoes, sand dunes—or human actions—have done away with other trees and even organic soil. The pumice flats I walked in central Oregon are in some ways typical of the kind of land matsutake knows how to inhabit: land on which most plants and other fungi can find no hold. On such impoverished landscapes, the indeterminacies of encounter loom. What pioneer has found its way here, and how can it live? Even the hardiest of seedlings is unlikely to make it unless it finds a partner in an equally hardy fungus to draw nutrients from the rocky ground. (What leaf? What mushroom?) The indeterminacy of fungal growth matters too. Might it encounter the roots of a receptive tree? A change in substrate or potential nutrition? Through its indeterminate growth, the fungus learns the landscape. There are humans to encounter as well. Will they inadvertently nurture the fungus while cutting firewood and gathering green manure? Or will they introduce hostile plantings, import exotic diseases, or pave the area for suburban development? Humans matter on these landscapes. And humans (like fungi and trees) bring histories with them to meet the challenges of the encounter. These histories, both human and not human, are never robotic programs but rather condensations in the indeterminate here and now; the past we grasp, as philosopher Walter Benjamin puts it, is a memory “that flashes in a moment of danger.”6 We enact history, Benjamin writes, as “a tiger’s leap into that which has gone before.”7 Science studies scholar Helen Verran offers another image: Among Australia’s Yolngu people, she relates, the recollection of the ancestors’ dreaming is condensed for present challenges in a rite at the climax of which a spear is thrown into the center of the storytellers’ circle. The toss of the spear merges the past in the here and now.8 Through smell, all of us know that spear’s throw, that tiger’s leap. The past we bring to encounters is condensed in smell. To smell childhood visits with one’s grandparents condenses a great chunk of Japanese history, Smelling 51 not just the vitality of village life in the mid-twentieth century, but the nineteenth-century deforestation that came before, denuding the landscape, and the urbanization and abandonment of the forests that later followed. While some Japanese may smell nostalgia in the forests made by their disturbances, this is not, of course, the only feeling that people bring to such wild places. Consider the smell of matsutake again. It is time to tell you that most people of European origin can’t stand the smell. A Norwegian gave the Eurasian species its first scientific name, Tricholoma nauseosum, the nauseating Trich. (In recent years, taxonomists made an exception to usual rules of precedence to rename the mushroom, acknowledging Japanese tastes, as Tricholoma matsutake.) Americans of European descent tend to be equally unimpressed by the smell of the Pacific Northwest’s Tricholoma magnivelare. “Mold,” “turpentine,” “mud,” white pickers said, when I asked them to characterize the smell. More than one moved our conversation to the foul smell of rotting fungi. Some were familiar with California mycologist David Arora’s characterization of the smell as “a provocative compromise between ‘red hots’ and dirty socks.”9 Not exactly something you would want to eat. When Oregon’s white pickers prepare the mushroom as food, they pickle it or smoke it. The processing masks the smell, making the mushroom anonymous. It is not surprising, perhaps, that U.S. scientists have studied the smell of matsutake to see what it repels (slugs), but Japanese scientists have studied the smell to consider what it attracts (some flying insects).10 Is it the “same” smell if people bring such different sensibilities to the encounter? Does that problem stretch to slugs and gnats as well as people? What if noses—as in my experience—change? What if the mushroom too can change through its encounters? Matsutake in Oregon associate with many host trees. Oregon pickers can distinguish the host tree with which a particular matsutake has grown—partly from the size and shape, but partly from the smell. The subject came up one day when I examined some truly bad-smelling matsutake being offered for sale. The picker explained that he found these mushrooms under white fir, an unusual host tree for matsutake. Loggers, he said, call white fir “piss fir” because of the bad smell the wood emits when you cut it. The mushrooms smelled as bad as a wounded fir. 52 Interlude To me, they did not smell like matsutake at all. But wasn’t this smell some piss fir–matsutake combination, made in the encounter? There is an intriguing nature-culture knot in such indeterminacies. Different ways of smelling and different qualities of smell are wrapped up together. It seems impossible to describe the smell of matsutake without telling all the cultural-and-natural histories condensed together in it. Any attempt at definitive untangling—perhaps like artificial matsutake scent—is likely to lose the point: the indeterminate experience of encounter, with its tiger’s leap into history. What else is smell? The smell of matsutake wraps and tangles memory and history— and not just for humans. It assembles many ways of being in an affectladen knot that packs its own punch. Emerging from encounter, it shows us history-in-the-making. Smell it. I first heard of matsutake from mycologis t David Arora, who studied matsutake camps in Oregon between 1993 and 1998. I was looking for a culturally colorful global commodity, and Arora’s stories of matsutake intrigued me. He told me of the buyers set up tents by the side of the highway to buy mushrooms at night. “They have nothing to do all day, so they’ll have plenty of time to talk to you,” he ventured. And there the buyers were—but so much more! In the big camp, I seemed to have stepped into rural Southeast Asia. Mien wearing sarongs boiled water in kerosene cans over stone tripods and hung strips of game and fish over the stove to dry. Hmong all the way from North Carolina brought home-canned bamboo shoots for sale. Lao noodle tents sold not only pho but also the most authentic laap I had eaten in the United States, all raw blood, chilies, and intestines. Lao karaoke blared from battery-powered speakers. I even met a Cham picker, although he did not speak Cham, which I thought perhaps I could manage from its closeness to Malay. Mocking my linguistic limitations, a Khmer teenager wearing grunge boasted that he spoke four languages: Khmer, Lao, English, and Ebonics. Local Native Americans sometimes 58 Part II came to sell their mushrooms. There were also both whites and Latinos, although most avoided the official camp, staying in the woods alone or in small groups. And visitors: A Sacramento Filipino followed Mien friends up here one year, although he said he never got the point. A Portland Korean thought maybe he might join. Yet there was something not at all cosmopolitan about the scene as well: A rift separated these pickers and buyers from shops and consumers in Japan. Everyone knew that the mushrooms (except for a small percentage bought for Japanese American markets) were going to Japan. Every buyer and bulker longed to sell directly to Japan—but none had any idea how. Misconceptions about the matsutake trade both in Japan and in other supply sites proliferated. White pickers swore that the value of the mushrooms in Japan was as an aphrodisiac. (While matsutake in Japan do have phallic connotations, no one eats them as a drug.) Some complained about the Chinese Red Army, which, they said, drafted people to pick, which depressed global prices. (Pickers in China are independent, just as in Oregon.) When someone discovered extremely high prices in Tokyo on the Internet, no one realized that these prices referred to Japanese matsutake. One exceptional bulker, of Chinese origin and fluent in Japanese, whispered to me about these misunderstandings—but he was an outsider. Except for this man, Oregon pickers, buyers, and bulkers were completely in the dark about the Japanese side of the trade. They made up fantasy landscapes of Japan, and they did not know how to assess them. They had their own matsutake world: a patch of practices and meanings that brought them together as matsutake suppliers—but did not inform the mushrooms’ further passage. This rift between U.S. and Japanese segments of the commodity chain guided my search. Different processes for making and accessing value characterized each segment. Given this diversity, what makes this part of that global economy we call capitalism? It may seem odd to want to tackle capi talis m with a theory that stresses ephemeral assemblages and multidirectional histories. After all, the global economy has been the centerpiece of progress, and even radical critics have described its forward-looking motion as filling up the world. Like a giant bulldozer, capitalism appears to flatten the earth to its specifications. But all this only raises the stakes for asking what else is going on—not in some protected enclave, but rather everywhere, both inside and out. Impressed by the rise of factories in the nineteenth century, Marx showed us forms of capitalism that required the rationalization of wage labor and raw materials. Most analysts have followed this precedent, imagining a factory-driven system with a coherent governance structure, built in cooperation with nation-states. Yet today—as then—much of the economy takes place in radically different scenes. Supply chains snake back and forth not only across continents but also across standards; it would be hard to identify a single rationality across the chain. Yet assets are still amassed for further investment. How does this work? Capitalist edge effects, Oregon. Pickers line up to sell matsutake to a roadside buyer. Precarious livelihoods show themselves at the edges of capitalist governance. Precarity is that here and now in which pasts may not lead to futures. 62 Chapter 4 A supply chain is a particular kind of commodity chain: one in which lead firms direct commodity traffic.1 Throughout this part, I explore the supply chain linking matsutake pickers in the forests of Oregon with those who eat the mushrooms in Japan. The chain is surprising and full of cultural variety. The factory work through which we know capitalism is mainly missing. But the chain illuminates something important about capitalism today: Amassing wealth is possible without rationalizing labor and raw materials. Instead, it requires acts of translation across varied social and political spaces, which, borrowing from ecologists’ usage, I call “patches.” Translation, in Shiho Satsuka’s sense, is the drawing of one world-making project into another.2 While the term draws attention to language, it can also refer to other forms of partial attunement. Translations across sites of difference are capitalism: they make it possible for investors to accumulate wealth. How do mushrooms foraged as trophies of freedom become capitalist assets—and later, exemplary Japanese gifts? Answering this question requires attention to the unexpected assemblages of the chain’s component links, as well as the translation processes that draw the links together into a transnational circuit. Capitalism is a system for concentrating wealth, which makes possible new investments, which further concentrate wealth. This process is accumulation. Classic models take us to the factory: factory owners concentrate wealth by paying workers less than the value of the goods that the workers produce each day. Owners “accumulate” investment assets from this extra value. Even in factories, however, there are other elements of accumulation. In the nineteenth century, when capitalism first became an object of inquiry, raw materials were imagined as an infinite bequest from Nature to Man. Raw materials can no longer be taken for granted. In our food procurement system, for example, capitalists exploit ecologies not only by reshaping them but also by taking advantage of their capacities. Even in industrial farms, farmers depend on life processes outside their control, such as photosynthesis and animal digestion. In capitalist farms, living things made within ecological processes are coopted for Working the Edge 63 the concentration of wealth. This is what I call “salvage,” that is, taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control. Many capitalist raw materials (consider coal and oil) came into existence long before capitalism. Capitalists also cannot produce human life, the prerequisite of labor. “Salvage accumulation” is the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced. Salvage is not an ornament on ordinary capitalist processes; it is a feature of how capitalism works.3 Sites for salvage are simultaneously inside and outside capitalism; I call them “pericapitalist.”4 All kinds of goods and services produced by pericapitalist activities, human and nonhuman, are salvaged for capitalist accumulation. If a peasant family produces a crop that enters capitalist food chains, capital accumulation is possible through salvaging the value created in peasant farming. Now that global supply chains have come to characterize world capitalism, we see this process everywhere. “Supply chains” are commodity chains that translate value to the benefit of dominant firms; translation between noncapitalist and capitalist value systems is what they do. Salvage accumulation through global supply chains is not new, and some well-known earlier examples can clarify how it works. Consider the nineteenth-century ivory supply chain connecting central Africa and Europe as told in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. 5 The story turns around the narrator’s discovery that the European trader he much admired has turned to savagery to procure his ivory. The savagery is a surprise because everyone expects the European presence in Africa to be a force for civilization and progress. Instead, civilization and progress turn out to be cover-ups and translation mechanisms for getting access to value procured through violence: classic salvage. For a brighter view of supply-chain translation, consider Herman Melville’s account of the nineteenth-century procurement of whale oil for Yankee investors.6 Moby-Dick tells of a ship of whalers whose rowdy cosmopolitanism contrasts sharply with our stereotypes of factory discipline; yet the oil they obtain from killing whales around the world enters a U.S.-based capitalist supply chain. Strangely, all the harpooners on the Pequod are unassimilated indigenous people from Asia, Africa, America, and the Pacific. The ship is unable to kill a single whale without the expertise of people who are completely untrained in U.S. 64 Chapter 4 industrial discipline. But the products of this work must eventually be translated into capitalist value forms; the ship sails only because of capitalist financing. The conversion of indigenous knowledge into capitalist returns is salvage accumulation. So too is the conversion of whale life into investments. Before you conclude that salvage accumulation is archaic, let me turn to a contemporary example. Technological advances in managing inventory have energized today’s global supply chains; inventory management allows lead firms to source their products from all kinds of economic arrangements, capitalist and otherwise. One firm that helped put such innovations in place is the retail giant Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart pioneered the required use of universal product codes (UPCs), the blackand-white bars that allow computers to know these products as inventory.7 The legibility of inventory, in turn, means that Wal-Mart is able to ignore the labor and environmental conditions through which its products are made: pericapitalist methods, including theft and violence, may be part of the production process. With a nod to Woody Guthrie, we might think about the contrast between production and accounting through the two sides of the UPC tag.8 One side of the tag, the side with the black-and-white bars, allows the product to be minutely tracked and assessed. The other side of the tag is blank, indexing Wal-Mart’s total lack of concern with how the product is made, since value can be translated through accounting. Wal-Mart has become famous for forcing its suppliers to make products ever more cheaply, thus encouraging savage labor and destructive environmental practices.9 Savage and salvage are often twins: Salvage translates violence and pollution into profit. As inventory moves increasingly under control, the requirement to control labor and raw materials recedes; supply chains make value from translating values produced in quite varied circumstances into capitalist inventory. One way of thinking about this is through scalability, the technical feat of creating expansion without the distortion of changing relations. The legibility of inventory allows scalable retail expansion for Wal-Mart without requiring that production be scalable. Production is left to the riotous diversity of nonscalability, with its relationally particular dreams and schemes. We know this best in “the race to the bottom”: the role of global supply chains in promoting coerced labor, dangerous sweatshops, poisonous substitute ingredients, and irresponsible Working the Edge 65 environmental gouging and dumping. Where lead firms pressure suppliers to provide cheaper and cheaper products, such production conditions are predictable outcomes. As in Heart of Darkness, unregulated production is translated in the commodity chain, and even reimagined as progress. This is frightening. At the same time, as J. K. Gibson-Graham argue in their optimistic reach toward a “postcapitalist politics,” economic diversity can be hopeful.10 Pericapitalist economic forms can be sites for rethinking the unquestioned authority of capitalism in our lives. At the very least, diversity offers a chance for multiple ways forward—not just one. In her insightful comparison between the supply chains for French green beans (haricots verts) that link West Africa with France and East Africa with Great Britain, respectively, geographer Susanne Freidberg offers a sense of how supply chains, drawing variously on colonial and national histories, may encourage quite different economic forms.11 French neocolonial schemes mobilize peasant cooperatives; British supermarket standards encourage expatriate scam operations.12 Within and across differences such as these, there is room for building a politics to confront and navigate salvage accumulation. But following GibsonGraham to call this politics “postcapitalist” seems to me premature. Through salvage accumulation, lives and products move back and forth between noncapitalist and capitalist forms; these forms shape each other and interpenetrate. The term “pericapitalist” acknowledges that those of us caught in such translations are never fully shielded from capitalism; pericapitalist spaces are unlikely platforms for a safe defense and recuperation. At the same time, the more prominent critical alternative—shutting one’s eyes to economic diversity—seems even more ridiculous in these times. Most critics of capitalism insist on the unity and homogeneity of the capitalist system; many, like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, argue that there is no longer a space outside of capitalism’s empire.13 Everything is ruled by a singular capitalist logic. As for Gibson-Graham, this claim is an attempt to build a critical political position: the possibility of transcending capitalism. Critics who stress the uniformity of capitalism’s hold on the world want to overcome it through a singular solidarity. But what blinders this hope requires! Why not instead admit to economic diversity? 66 Chapter 4 My goal in bringing up Gibson-Graham and Hardt and Negri is not to dismiss them; indeed, I think they are perhaps the early twenty-first century’s most trenchant anticapitalist critics. Furthermore, by setting out strongly contrasting goal posts between which we might think and play, they jointly do us an important service. Is capitalism a single, overarching system that conquers all, or one segregated economic form among many?14 Between these two positions, we might see how capitalist and noncapitalist forms interact in pericapitalist spaces. Gibson-Graham advise us, quite correctly I think, that what they call “noncapitalist” forms can be found everywhere in the midst of capitalist worlds—rather than just in archaic backwaters. But they see such forms as alternatives to capitalism. Instead, I would look for the noncapitalist elements on which capitalism depends. Thus, for example, when Jane Collins reports that workers in Mexican garment assembly factories are expected to know how to sew before they begin their jobs, because they are women, we are offered a glimpse of noncapitalist and capitalist economic forms working together.15 Women learn to sew growing up at home; salvage accumulation is the process that brings this skill into the factory to the benefit of owners. To understand capitalism (and not just its alternatives), then, we can’t stay inside the logics of capitalists; we need an ethnographic eye to see the economic diversity through which accumulation is possible. It takes concrete histories to make any concept come to life. And isn’t mushroom collecting a place to look, after progress? The rifts and bridges of the Oregon-to-Japan matsutake commodity chain show capitalism achieved through economic diversity. Matsutake foraged and sold in pericapitalist performances become capitalist inventory as they are sent to Japan a day later. Such translation is the central problem of many global supply chains. Let me begin by describing the first part of the chain.16 Americans don’t like middlemen, who, they say, just rip off value. But middlemen are consummate translators; their presence directs us to salvage accumulation. Consider the North American side of the commodity chain that brings matsutake from Oregon to Japan. (The Japanese side—with its many middlemen—will be considered later.) Indepen- Working the Edge 67 dent foragers pick the mushrooms in national forests. They sell to independent buyers, who sell, in turn, to bulkers’ field agents, who sell to other bulkers or to exporters, who sell and ship, at last, to importers in Japan. Why so many middlemen? The best answer may be a history. Japanese traders began importing matsutake in the 1980s, when the scarcity of matsutake in Japan first became clear. Japan was bursting with investment capital, and matsutake were prime luxuries, equally suitable as perks, gifts, or bribes. American matsutake were still an expensive novelty in Tokyo, and restaurants competed to get some. Emerging matsutake traders in Japan were like other Japanese traders of that time, ready to use their capital to organize supply chains. The mushrooms were expensive, so the incentives for suppliers were good. North American traders remember the 1990s as a time of extraordinary prices—and high-risk gambling. If a supplier was able to hit the Japanese markets correctly, the payoff was huge. But with an inconsistent and easy-to-spoil forest product and rapidly changing demand, the possibilities for total wipeout were also great. Everyone spoke of those days in casino metaphors. One Japanese trader compared the importers then to the Mafia in international ports after World War I: It was not just that the importers were gambling but that they were also catalyzing gambling—and keeping the gambling going. Japanese importers needed local know-how, and they began through alliances with exporters. In the Pacific Northwest, the first exporters were Asian Canadians in Vancouver—and because of their precedent, most U.S. matsutake continue to be exported by their firms. These exporters were not interested only in matsutake. They shipped seafood, or cherries, or log homes to Japan; matsutake were added to those activities. Some—especially the Japanese immigrants—told me they added matsutake to sweeten long-term relations with importers. They were willing to ship matsutake at a loss, they said, to keep their relations intact. Alliances between exporters and importers formed a basis for the transpacific trade. But the exporters—experts in fish, or fruit, or timber— knew nothing about how to get the mushrooms. In Japan, matsutake come to the market via an agricultural cooperative, or from individual farmers. In North America, matsutake are scattered across enormous national (U.S.) or commonwealth (Canadian) forests. This is where the small companies that I call “bulkers” come in; bulkers gather mushrooms 68 Chapter 4 to sell to exporters. Bulkers’ field agents buy mushrooms from “buyers” who buy from pickers. Field agents, like buyers, must know the terrain and the people likely to search it. In the earliest days of the U.S. Pacific Northwest matsutake trade, most field agents, buyers, and pickers were white men who found solace in the mountains, such as Vietnam veterans, displaced loggers, and rural “traditionalists” who rejected liberal urban society. After 1989, an increasing number of refugees from Laos and Cambodia came to pick, and field agents had to stretch their abilities to work with Southeast Asians. Southeast Asians eventually became buyers, and a few became field agents. Working around each other, the whites and Southeast Asians found a common vocabulary in “freedom,” which could mean many things dear to each group, even if they were not the same. Native Americans found resonance, but Latino pickers did not share the rhetoric of freedom. Despite this variation, the overlapping concerns of self-exiled whites and Southeast Asian refugees became the heartbeat of the trade; freedom brought out the matsutake. Through shared concerns with freedom, the U.S. Pacific Northwest became one of the world’s great matsutake exporting areas. Yet this way of life was segregated from the rest of the commodity chain. Bulkers and buyers longed to export matsutake directly to Japan but did not succeed. Neither buyers nor bulkers could get beyond the already difficult exchange with Canadian exporters of Asian origin, for whom English was not often a first language. They complained about unfair practices, but in fact they were useless at the cultural translation necessary for the making of inventory. For it is not just language that separates pickers, buyers, and bulkers in Oregon from Japanese traders; it is the conditions of production. Oregon mushrooms are contaminated with the cultural practices of “freedom.” The story of an exception makes the point. “Wei” first went to Japan from his native China to study music; when he found he could not make a living, he entered the Japanese vegetable import trade. He became fluent in Japanese, although still prickly about some features of life in Japan. When his company wanted someone to go to North America, he volunteered. This is how he became an idiosyncratic combination of field agent, bulker, and exporter. He goes to the matsutake area to watch the buying, just like other field agents, but he has a direct line Working the Edge 69 to Japan. Unlike the other field agents, he is constantly on the phone with Japanese traders, gauging opportunities and prices. He also talks to Japanese Canadian exporters, although he does not sell his mushrooms through them; because he can talk to them in Japanese, they constantly ask him to explain conditions in the field, including the behavior of the field agents whose mushrooms they buy. Meanwhile, the other field agents refuse to include him in their company and conspire against his buyers. He is not welcomed into their discussions, and, indeed, is shunned by the freedom-loving mountain men. Unlike the other field agents, Wei pays his buyers a salary, rather than a commission. He demands the loyalty and discipline of employees, refusing them the freewheeling independence of the other buyers. He buys matsutake for particular shipments, with particular characteristics, rather than buying for the pleasure and prowess of free competition, as the others do. He is already making inventory in the buying tents. His difference highlights the distinctiveness of the freedom assemblage as a patch. As international matsutake commerce entered the twenty-first century, regularization was afoot in Japan. Prices there stabilized as supply chains in many countries developed, as rankings of foreign matsutake congealed, and as perk-money in Japan diminished and the demand for matsutake became more specialized. The prices of Oregon matsutake in Japan became relatively stable—considering, of course, that matsutake is still a wild product with an irregular supply. However, this stability was not reflected in Oregon, where prices continued to roller-coaster, even if never returning to 1990s’ highs. When I talked to Japanese importers about this discrepancy, they explained it as a matter of American “psychology.” An importer who specialized in Oregon matsutake was thrilled to show me photographs from his visits and reminisce about his Wild West experiences in Oregon. White and Southeast Asian pickers and buyers, he explained, would not produce mushrooms without the excitement of what he called an “auction,” and the more the price fluctuated, the better the buying. (In contrast, he said, Mexican pickers in Oregon were willing to accept a constant price, but the others dominated the trade.) His job was to facilitate American peculiarities; his company had a parallel specialist in Chinese matsutake, whose job was to accommodate Chinese quirks. By facilitating varied cultural economies, his 70 Chapter 4 company could build its business through mushrooms from around the world. It was this man’s expectation of the necessity of cultural translation that first alerted me to the problem of salvage accumulation. In the 1970s, Americans expected the globalization of capital to mean the spread of U.S. business standards all over the world. In contrast, Japanese traders had become specialists in building international supply chains and using them as mechanisms of translation to bring goods into Japan without Japanese production facilities or employment standards. As long as these goods could be made into legible inventory in their transit to Japan, Japanese traders could use them to accumulate capital. By the end of the century, Japanese economic power had slipped, and twentieth-century Japanese business innovations were eclipsed by neoliberal reforms. But no one cares to reform the matsutake commodity chain; it is too small and too “Japanese.” Here is a place, then, to look for the Japanese trading strategies that rocked the world. At their center is translation between diverse economies. Traders as translators become masters of salvage accumulation. Before taking on translation, however, I need to visit the freedom assemblage. One cold October night in the late 1990s, three Hmong American matsutake pickers huddled in their tent. Shivering, they brought their gas cooking stove inside to provide a little warmth. They went to sleep with the stove on. It went out. The next morning, all three were dead, asphyxiated by the fumes. Their deaths left the campground vulnerable, haunted by their ghosts. Ghosts can paralyze you, taking away your ability to move or speak. The Hmong pickers moved away, and the others soon moved too. The U.S. Forest Service did not know about the ghosts. They wanted to rationalize the pickers’ camping area, to make it accessible to police and emergency services, and easier for campground hosts to enforce rules and fees. In the early 1990s, Southeast Asian pickers had camped where they pleased, like everyone else who visits the national forests. But whites complained that Southeast Asians left too much litter. The Forest Communal agendas, Oregon. A Mien pickers’ encampment. Here Mien recalled village life and escaped the confinements of California cities. 74 Chapter 5 Service responded by shunting the pickers to a lonely access road. At the time of the deaths, the pickers were camped all along the road. But soon afterward, the Forest Service built a great grid, with numbered camping spaces, scattered portable toilets, and, after many complaints, a large tank of water at the (rather distant) campground entrance. The campsites had no amenities, but the pickers—escaping from the ghosts—quickly made them their own. Mimicking the structure of the refugee camps in Thailand where many had spent more than a decade, they segregated themselves into ethnic groups: on one end, Mien and then those Hmong willing to stay; half a mile away, Lao and then Khmer; in an isolated hollow, way back, a few whites. The Southeast Asians built structures of slim pine poles and tarps and put their tents inside, sometimes with the addition of wood stoves. As in rural Southeast Asia, possessions were hung from the rafters, and an enclosure gave privacy for dip baths. In the center of the camp, a big tent sold hot bowls of pho. Eating the food, listening to the music, and observing the material culture, I thought I was in the hills of Southeast Asia, not the forests of Oregon. The Forest Service’s idea about emergency access did not work out as it imagined. A few years later, someone called emergency services in behalf of a critically wounded picker. Regulations aimed only at the mushroom camp required the ambulance to wait for police escort before entering. The ambulance waited for hours. When the police finally showed up, the man was dead. Emergency access had not been limited by terrain but by discrimination. This man, too, left a dangerous ghost, and no one slept near his campsite except Oscar, a white man and one of the few local residents to seek out Southeast Asians, who did it once, drunk, on a dare. Oscar’s success in getting through the night led him to try picking mushrooms on a nearby mountain, sacred to local Native Americans and the home of their ghosts. But the Southeast Asians I knew stayed away from that mountain. They knew about ghosts. Oregon’s center of matsutake commerce in the first decade of the twenty-first century was a place not marked on any map, “in the middle of nowhere.” Everyone in the trade knew where it was, but it wasn’t a Open Ticket, Oregon 75 town or a recreation site; it was officially invisible. Buyers had established a cluster of tents along the highway, and every evening pickers, buyers, and field agents gathered there, turning it into a theater of lively suspense and action. Because the place is self-consciously off the map, I decided to make up a name to protect people’s privacy, and to add some characters from the up-and-coming matsutake trading spot down the road. My composite field site is “Open Ticket, Oregon.” “Open ticket” is actually the name of a mushroom-buying practice. In the evening after returning from the woods, pickers sell their mushrooms for the buyer’s price per pound, adjusted in relation to the mushroom’s size and maturity, its “grade.” Most wild mushrooms carry a stable price. But the price of matsutake shoots up and down. Within the night, the price may easily shift by $10 per pound or more. Within the season, price shifts are much greater. Between 2004 and 2008, prices shifted between $2 and $60 per pound for the best mushrooms—and this range is nothing compared with earlier years. “Open ticket” means that a picker may return to the buyer for the difference between the original price paid and a higher price offered on the same night. Buyers— who earn a commission based on the poundage they buy—offer open ticket to entice pickers to sell early in the evening, rather than waiting to see if prices will rise. Open ticket is testimony to the unspoken power of pickers to negotiate buying conditions. It also illustrates the strategies of buyers, who continually try to put each other out of business. Open ticket is a practice of making and affirming freedom for both pickers and buyers. It seems an apt name for a site of freedom’s performance. For what is exchanged every evening is not just mushrooms and money. Pickers, buyers, and field agents are engaged in dramatic enactments of freedom, as they separately understand it, and they exchange these, encouraging each other, along with their trophies: money and mushrooms. Sometimes, indeed, it seemed to me that the really important exchange was the freedom, with the mushroom-and-money trophies as extensions—proofs, as it were—of the performance. After all, it was the feeling of freedom, galvanizing “mushroom fever,” that energized buyers to put on their best shows and pressed pickers to get up the next dawn to search for mushrooms again. But what is this freedom about which pickers spoke? The more I asked about it, the more unfamiliar it became to me. This is not the 76 Chapter 5 freedom imagined by economists, who use that term to talk about the regularities of individual rational choice. Nor is it political liberalism. This mushroomers’ freedom is irregular and outside rationalization; it is performative, communally varied, and effervescent. It has something to do with the rowdy cosmopolitanism of the place; freedom emerges from open-ended cultural interplay, full of potential conflict and misunderstanding. I think it exists only in relation to ghosts. Freedom is the negotiation of ghosts on a haunted landscape; it does not exorcise the haunting but works to survive and negotiate it with flair. Open Ticket is haunted by many ghosts: not only the “green” ghosts of pickers who died untimely deaths; not only the Native American communities removed by U.S. laws and armies; not only the stumps of great trees cut down by reckless loggers, never to be replaced; not only the haunting memories of war that will not seem to go away; but also the ghostly appearance of forms of power—held in abeyance—that enter the everyday work of picking and buying. Some kinds of power are there, but not there; this haunting is a place from which to begin to understand this multiply culturally layered enactment of freedom. Consider these absences that make Open Ticket what it is: Open Ticket is far from the concentration of power; it is the opposite of a city. It is missing social order. As Seng, a Lao picker, put it, “Buddha is not here.” Pickers are selfish and greedy, he said; he was impatient to return to the temple where things were properly arranged. But, meanwhile, Dara, a Khmer teenager, explained that this is the only place she can grow up away from the violence of gangs. Yet Thong is a (former?) Lao gang member; I think he is getting away from warrants for his arrest. Open Ticket is a hodgepodge of flights from the city. White Vietnam vets told me they wanted to be away from crowds, which sparked flashbacks from the war and uncontrollable panic attacks. Hmong and Mien told me they were disappointed in America, which had promised them freedom but instead crowded them into tiny urban apartments; only in the mountains could they find the freedom they remembered from Southeast Asia. Mien in particular hoped to reconstitute a remembered village life in the matsutake forest. Matsutake picking was a time to see dispersed friends and to be away from the constraints of crowded families. Nai Tong, a Mien grandmother, explained that her daughter called her every day to beg her to come home to take care of the grandchildren. But Open Ticket, Oregon 77 she calmly repeated that she had at least to make up the money for her picking permit; she could not go back yet. The important bits were left unsaid in those calls: Escaping from apartment life, she had the freedom of the hills. The money was less important than the freedom. Matsutake picking is not the city, although haunted by it. Picking is also not labor—or even “work.” Sai, a Lao picker, explained that “work” means obeying your boss, doing what he tells you to. In contrast, matsutake picking is “searching.” It is looking for your fortune, not doing your job. When a white campground owner, sympathetic to the pickers, talked to me about how the pickers deserved more because they work so hard, getting up at dawn and staying through sun and snow, something nagged at me about her view. I had never heard a picker talk like that. No pickers I met imagined the money they gained from matsutake as a return on their labor. Even Nai Tong’s time babysitting was more akin to work than mushroom picking. Tom, a white field agent who had spent years as a picker, was particularly clear about rejecting labor. He had been an employee of a big timber company, but one day he put his equipment in his locker, walked out the door, and never looked back. He moved his family into the woods and earned from what the land would give him. He has gathered cones for seed companies and trapped beaver for skins. He has picked all kinds of mushrooms—not to eat but to sell, and he has taken his skills into the buying scene. Tom tells me how liberals have ruined American society; men no longer know how to be men. The best answer is to reject what liberals think of as “standard employment.” Tom goes to great lengths to explain to me that the buyers he works with are not employees but independent businessmen. Even though he gives them large amounts of cash every day to buy mushrooms, they can sell to any field agent—and I know they do. It’s an all cash business, too, without contracts, so if a buyer decides to abscond with his cash, he says, there is nothing he can do about it. (Amazingly, buyers who abscond often come back to deal with another field agent.) But the scales he lends buyers for weighing mushrooms, he points out, are his; he could call the police about the scales. He tells the story of a recent buyer who absconded with several thousand dollars—but made the mistake of taking the scale. Tom drove down the road in the direction he believed the buyer took, and, sure enough, there was the scale abandoned 78 Chapter 5 by the side of the road. The cash was gone of course; but that was the risk of independent business. Pickers bring many kinds of cultural heritage to their rejection of labor. Mad Jim celebrates his Native American ancestors in matsutake picking. After many jobs, he said, he was working as a bartender on the coast. A Native woman walked in with a $100 bill; shocked, he asked where she got it. “Picking mushrooms,” she told him. Jim went out the next day. It wasn’t easy to learn: he crawled through the brush; he followed animals. Now he knows how to stalk the dunes for the matsutake buried deep in the sand. He knows where to look under tangled rhododendron roots in the mountains. He has never gone back to wage work. Lao-Su works in a Wal-Mart warehouse in California when he is not picking matsutake, making $11.50 an hour. To get that pay rate, however, he had to agree to work without medical benefits. When he hurt his back on the job and was unable to lift merchandise, he was given a long leave to recover. While he hopes the company will take him back, he says he gets more money from matsutake picking than from Wal-Mart anyway, despite the fact that the mushroom season is only two months long. Besides, he and his wife look forward to joining the vibrant Mien community in Open Ticket every year. They consider it a vacation; on weekends, their children and grandchildren sometimes come up to join them in picking. Matsutake picking is not “labor,” but it is haunted by labor. So, too, property: Matsutake pickers act as if the forest was an extensive commons. The land is not officially a commons. It is mainly national forest, with some adjacent private land, all fully protected by the state. But the pickers do their best to ignore questions of property. White pickers are particularly aggravated by federal property and do their best to thwart restrictions on using it. Southeast Asian pickers are generally warmer to government, expressing wishes that it would do more. Unlike white pickers, many of whom are proud of picking without a permit, most Southeast Asians register with the Forest Service for permission to pick. However, the fact that law enforcement tends to single out Asians for infractions even without evidence—as one Khmer buyer put it, “driving while being Asian”—makes it seem less worth the effort to stay within the law. Not many do. Open Ticket, Oregon 79 Vast lands without boundary markers makes staying in approved picking zones quite difficult, as I found from my own experience. Once, a sheriff staked out my car to catch me without a permit when I returned with mushrooms. Even as an avid reader of maps, I had been unable to tell whether this place was on or off limits.1 I was lucky; I was just at the border. But it wasn’t marked. Once, too, after I had pleaded with a Lao family for days to take me picking, they agreed, if I would drive. We chugged through forest on unmarked dirt roads for what seemed hours before they told me we had arrived at the place they wanted to pick. When I pulled over, they asked me why I wasn’t trying to hide the car. Only then did I realize that we were surely trespassing. The fines are steep. During my fieldwork, the fine for picking in a national park was $2,000 on the first offense. But law enforcement is thin on the ground, and the roads and trails are many. The national forest is crisscrossed with abandoned logging roads; these make it possible for pickers to travel across extensive forestland. Young men, too, are willing to hike many miles, looking for the most isolated mushroom patches—perhaps on forbidden lands, perhaps not. When the mushrooms get to the buyers, no one asks.2 But what is “public property” if not an oxymoron? Certainly, the Forest Service has trouble with it in these times. Legislation requires that public forests be thinned for fire protection for a square mile around private inholdings; this requires a lot of public funds to save a few private assets.3 Meanwhile, private timber companies do that thinning, making further profits from public forests. And, while logging is allowed within Late Successional Reserves, pickers are forbidden— because no one has found funds for an environmental impact assessment. If pickers have trouble sorting out which kinds of lands are offlimits, they are not alone in their confusion. The difference between the two kinds of confusion is also instructive. The Forest Service is asked to uphold property, even if it means neglecting the public. The pickers do their best to hold property in abeyance as they pursue a commons haunted by the possibility of their own exclusion. Freedom/haunting: two sides of the same experience. Conjuring a future full of pasts, a ghost-ridden freedom is both a way to move on and a way to remember. In its fever, picking escapes the separation of persons and things so dear to industrial production. The mushrooms 80 Chapter 5 are not yet alienated commodities; they are effects of the pickers’ freedom. Yet this scene only exists because the two-sided experience has purchase in a strange sort of commerce. Buyers translate freedom trophies into trade through dramatic performances of “free market competition.” Thus market freedom enters freedom’s jumble, making the holding in abeyance of concentrated power, labor, property, and alienation seem strong and effective. It’s time to get back to the buying in Open Ticket. It’s late afternoon, and some of the white field agents are sitting around joking. They accuse each other of lying and call each other “vultures” and “Wile E. Coyote.” They are right. They agree to open at the price of $10 a pound for number one mushrooms, but almost no one does. The minute the tents open, the competition is on. The field agents call their buyers to offer opening prices—perhaps $12 or even $15 if they agreed on $10. It is up to the buyers to report back about what is happening in the buying tents. Pickers come in and ask about the prices. But the price is a secret—unless you are a regular seller, or, alternatively, you are already showing your mushrooms. Other buyers send their friends, disguised as pickers, to find the price, so it is not something to tell just anyone. Then, when a buyer wants to raise prices, to beat the competition, he or she is supposed to call the field agent. If not, the buyer will have to pay the price difference from his or her commission—but this is a tactic many are willing to try. Soon enough, calls ricochet between pickers, buyers, and field agents. The prices are shifting. “It’s dangerous!” one field agent would tell me as he stalked around the buying area, watching the scene. He could not talk to me during the buying; it demanded his full attention. Barking commands into his cell phone, each tried to stay ahead—and to trip up the others. Meanwhile, field agents are on the phone to their bulking companies and exporters, learning how high they can go. It’s exciting and exacting work to put the others out of business as well as one can. “Imagine the time before cell phones!” one field agent reminisced. Everyone lined up at the two public phone booths, trying to get through as the prices changed. Even now, every field agent surveys the buying field like a general on an old-fashioned battlefield, his phone, like a field Open Ticket, Oregon 81 radio, constantly at his ear. He sends out spies. He must react quickly. If he raises the price at the right time, his buyers will get the best mushrooms. Better yet, he might push a competitor to raise the price too high, forcing him to buy too many mushrooms, and, if all goes really right, to close down for a few days. There are all kinds of tricks. If the price spikes, a buyer can get pickers to take his mushrooms to sell to other buyers: Better the money than the mushrooms. There will be rude laughter for days, fuel for another round of calling the others liars—and yet, no one goes out of business despite all these efforts.4 This is a performance of competition—not a necessity of business. The point is the drama. Let’s say it’s dark now, and pickers are lined up to sell at a buying tent. They have picked this buyer not only because of his prices, but because they know he is a skilled sorter. Sorting is just as important as basic prices, because a buyer assigns a grade to each mushroom, and the price depends on the grade. And what an art sorting is! Sorting is an eye-catching, rapid-fire dance of the arms with the legs held still. White men make it look like juggling; Lao women—the other champion buyers—make it look like Royal Lao dancing. A good sorter knows a lot about the mushrooms just from touching them. Matsutake with insect larvae will spoil the batch before it arrives in Japan; it is essential that the buyer refuse them. But only an inexperienced buyer cuts into the mushroom to look for larvae. Good buyers know from the feel. They can also smell the provenance of the mushroom: its host tree; the region it comes from; other plants, such as rhododendron, which affect the size and shape. Everyone enjoys watching a good buyer sort. It is a public performance full of prowess. Sometimes pickers photograph the sorting. Sometimes they also photograph their best mushrooms, or the money, especially when it is hundred dollar bills. These are trophies of the chase. Buyers try to assemble “crews,” that is, loyal pickers, but pickers do not feel the obligation to continue selling to any buyer. So buyers court pickers, using ties of kinship, language, and ethnicity, or special bonuses. Buyers offer pickers food and coffee—or, sometimes, stronger beverages, such as alcoholic tonics laced with herbs and scorpions. Pickers sit around eating and drinking outside buyers’ tents; where they share common war experiences with the buyers, the camaraderie may last until late at night. But such groups are evanescent; all it takes is a rumor of a 82 Chapter 5 high price or a special deal, and pickers are off to another tent, another circle. Yet the prices are not so different. Might performance be part of the point? Competition and independence mean freedom for all. Sometimes pickers have been known to wait, sitting in their pickup trucks with their mushrooms, because they are dissatisfied with everyone’s prices. But they must sell before the evening is over; they cannot keep the mushrooms. Waiting too is part of the performance of freedom: freedom to search wherever one pleases—holding propriety, labor, and property at arm’s length; freedom to bring one’s mushrooms to any buyer, and for the buyers, to any field agent; freedom to put the other buyers out of business; freedom to make a killing or lose it all. Once I told an economist about this buying scene, and he was excited, telling me this was the true and basic form of capitalism, without the pollution of powerful interests and inequalities. This was real capitalism, he said, where the playing field was level, as it should be. But is Open Ticket’s picking and buying capitalism? The problem is that there isn’t any capital. There is a lot of money changing hands, but it slips away, never forming an investment. The only accumulation is happening downstream, in Vancouver, Tokyo, and Kobe, where exporters and importers use the matsutake trade to build their firms. Open Ticket’s mushrooms join streams of capital there, but they are not procured in what seems to me a capitalist formation. But there are clearly “market mechanisms”: or are there? The whole point of competitive markets, according to economists, is to lower prices, forcing suppliers to procure goods in more efficient ways. But Open Ticket’s buying competition has the explicit goal of raising prices. Everyone says so: pickers, buyers, bulkers. The purpose of playing with prices is to see if the price can be increased, so that everyone at Open Ticket benefits. Many seem to think that there is an ever-flowing spring of money in Japan, and the goal of competitive theater is to force open the pipes so that the money will flow to Open Ticket. Old timers all remember 1993, when the price of matsutake in Open Ticket rose briefly to $600 a pound in the hands of pickers. All you had to do was find one fat button, and you had $300!5 Even after that high, they say, in the 1990s a single picker could make several thousand dollars in one day. How might access to that flow of money be opened again? Open Ticket buyers and bulkers stake their bets on competition to raise prices. Open Ticket, Oregon 83 It seems to me that there are two framing circumstances that allow this set of beliefs and practices to flourish. First, American businessmen have naturalized the expectation that the U.S. government will apply muscle in their behalf: As long as they perform “competition,” the government will twist the arms of foreign business partners to make sure American companies get the prices and market share they want.6 Open Ticket matsutake trading is much too small and inconspicuous to get that kind of government attention. Still, it is within this national expectation that buyers and bulkers engage in competitive performances to get the Japanese to offer them the best prices. As long as they show themselves properly “American,” they expect to succeed. Second, Japanese traders are willing to put up with such displays as signs of what the importer I mentioned called “American psychology.” Japanese traders expect to work in and around strange performances; if this is what brings in the goods, it should be encouraged. Later, exporters and importers can translate the exotic products of American freedom into Japanese inventory—and, through inventory, accumulation. What is this “American psychology” then? There are too many people and histories in Open Ticket to plunge directly into the coherence through which we usually imagine “culture.” The concept of assemblage—an open-ended entanglement of ways of being—is more useful. In an assemblage, varied trajectories gain a hold on each other, but indeterminacy matters. To learn about an assemblage, one unravels its knots. Open Ticket’s performances of freedom require following histories that stretch far beyond Oregon but show how Open Ticket’s entanglements might have come into being. In France they have two kinds, freedom and communist. In the U.S. they just have one kind: freedom. —Open Ticket Lao buyer, explaining why he came to the United States, not France The freedom about which so many pickers and buyers speak has far-flung referents as well as local ones. In Open Ticket, most explain their commitments to freedom as stemming from terrifying and tragic experiences in the U.S.-Indochina War and the civil wars that followed. When pickers talk about what shaped their lives, including their mushroom picking, most talk about surviving war. They are willing to brave the considerable dangers of the matsutake forest because it extends their living survival of war, a form of haunted freedom that goes everywhere with them. Yet engagements with war are culturally, nationally, and racially specific. The landscapes pickers construct vary with their legacies of Communal agendas, Oregon. Foraging with a rifle. Most pickers have terrible stories of surviving war. The freedom of the mushroom camps emerges out of varied histories of trauma and displacement. 86 Chapter 6 engagement with war. Some pickers wrap themselves in war stories without ever having lived through war. One wry Lao elder explained why even young Lao pickers wear camouflage: “These people weren’t soldiers; they’re just pretending to be soldiers.” When I asked about the dangers of being invisible to white deer hunters, a Hmong picker evoked a different imaginary: “We wear camouflage so we can hide if we see the hunters first.” If they saw him, hunters might hunt him, he implied. Pickers navigate the freedom of the forest through a maze of differences. Freedom as they described it is both an axis of commonality and a point from which communally specific agendas divide. Despite further differences within such agendas, a few portraits can suggest the varied ways the matsutake hunt is energized by freedom. This chapter extends my exploration of what pickers and buyers meant by freedom by turning to the stories they told about war. Frontier romanticism runs high in the mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest. It is common for whites to glorify Native Americans and identify with the settlers who tried to wipe them out. Self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, and the aesthetic force of white masculinity are points of pride. Many white mushroom pickers are advocates of U.S. conquest abroad, limited government, and white supremacy. Yet the rural northwest has also gathered hippies and iconoclasts. White veterans of the U.S.-Indochina War bring their war experiences into this rough and independent mix, adding a distinctive mixture of resentment and patriotism, trauma and threat. War memories are simultaneously disturbing and productive in forming this niche. War is damaging, they tell us, but it also makes men. Freedom can be found in war as well as against war. Two white veterans suggest the range of how freedom is expressed. Alan felt lucky when an aggravated childhood injury caused him to be sent home from Indochina. For the next six months he served as a driver on an American base. One day he received orders to return to Vietnam. He drove his jeep back to the depot and walked out of the base, AWOL. He spent the next four years hiding in the Oregon mountains, where he gained a new goal: to live in the woods and never pay rent. Later, when War Stories 87 the matsutake rush came, it suited him perfectly. Alan imagines himself as a gentle hippie who works against the combat culture of other vets. Once he went to Las Vegas and had a terrible flashback when surrounded by Asians at the casino. Life in the forest is his way of keeping clear of psychological danger. Not all war experience is so benign. When I first met Geoff I was overjoyed to find someone with so much knowledge about the forest. Telling me of the pleasures of his childhood in eastern Washington, he described the countryside with a passionate eye for detail. My enthusiasm to work with Geoff was transformed, however, when I talked with Tim, who explained that Geoff had served a long and difficult tour in Vietnam. Once, his group had jumped from a helicopter into an ambush. Many of the men were killed, and Geoff was shot through the neck but, miraculously, survived. When Geoff came home, he screamed so much at night that he could not stay home, and so he returned to the woods. But his war years were not over. Tim described a time when he and Geoff had surprised a group of Cambodian pickers on a mushroom patch Geoff thought of as one of his special places. Geoff had opened fire, and the Cambodians scrambled into the bushes to get away. Once Tim and Geoff shared a cabin, but Geoff spent the night brooding and sharpening his knife. “Do you know how many men I killed in Vietnam?” he asked Tim. “One more wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” White pickers imagine themselves not only as violent vets but also as self-sufficient mountain men: loners, tough, and resourceful. One point of connection with those who did not fight is hunting. One white buyer, too old for Vietnam but a strong supporter of U.S. wars, explained that hunting, like war, builds character. We spoke of then Vice President Cheney, who had shot a friend while bird hunting; it was through the ordinariness of accidents such as this that hunting makes men, he said. Through hunting, even noncombatants can experience the forest landscape as a site for making freedom. Cambodian refugees cannot easily join established Pacific Northwest legacies; they have had to make up their own histories of freedom in the United States. Such histories are guided not only by U.S. bombardment 88 Chapter 6 and the subsequent terrors of the Khmer Rouge regime and civil war, but also by their moment of entry into the United States: the shutting down of the U.S. welfare state in the 1980s. No one offered Cambodians stable jobs with benefits. Like other Southeast Asian refugees, they had to make something from what they had—including their war experiences. The matsutake boom made forest foraging, with its opportunities for making a living through sheer intrepidness, an appealing option. What then is freedom? One white field agent, exalting the pleasures of war, suggested I speak with Ven, a Cambodian who, the field agent said, would show me that even Asians love U.S. imperial war. Given that Ven spoke to me with this introduction, I was not surprised by his endorsement of American freedom as a military quest. Yet our conversation took turns that I don’t imagine the field agent would have expected, and yet it echoed other Cambodians in the forest. First, in the confusions of the Cambodian civil war, it was never quite clear on which side one was fighting. Where white vets imagined freedom on a starkly divided racial landscape, Cambodians told stories in which war bounced one from one side to the other without one’s knowledge. Second, where white vets sometimes took to the hills to live out war’s traumatic freedom, Cambodians offered a more optimistic vision of recovery in the forests of American freedom. At the age of thirteen, Ven left his village to join an armed struggle. His goal was to repel Vietnamese invaders. He says he did not know the national affiliations of his group; he later found it to be a Khmer Rouge affiliate. Because of his youth, the commander befriended him and he was kept safe, close to the leaders. Later, however, the commander fell out of favor, and Ven became a political detainee. His group of detainees was sent to the jungle to fend for themselves. By chance, this turned out to be an area Ven knew from his fighting days. Where others saw empty jungle, he knew the concealed paths and forest resources. At this point in the story, I expected him to say that he escaped, especially since he was beaming with pride about his jungle knowledge. But no: He showed the group a hidden spring, without which they would not have had fresh water. Perhaps there was something empowering about this forest detention, even in its coercions. Returning to the forest draws from this spark—but only, he explained, in the safety of American imperial freedom. War Stories 89 Other Cambodians spoke about mushroom foraging as healing from war. One woman described how weak she was when she first came to the United States; her legs were so frail that she could hardly walk. Mushroom foraging has brought back her health. Her freedom, she explained, is freedom of motion. Heng told me about his experiences in a Cambodian militia. He was the leader of thirty men. But while patrolling one day he stepped on a land mine, which blew off his leg. He begged his comrades to shoot him, since the life of a one-legged man in Cambodia was beyond what he imagined as human. Through luck, however, he was picked up by a UN mission and transported to Thailand. In the United States he gets along well on his artificial leg. Still, when he told his relatives that he would pick mushrooms in the forest, they scoffed. They refused to take him with them, since, they said, he would never be able to keep up. Finally, an aunt dropped him off at the base of a mountain, telling him to find his own way. He found mushrooms! Ever since, the matsutake harvest has been an affirmation of his mobility. Another of his buddies is missing the other leg, and he jokes that together in the mountains, they are “complete.” The Oregon mountains are both a cure for and a connection to old habits and dreams. I was startled into seeing this one day when I asked Heng about deer hunters. I had been picking by myself that afternoon when suddenly shots rang out nearby. I was terrified; I didn’t know which way to run. I asked Heng about it later. “Don’t run!” he said. “To run shows that you are afraid. I would never run. That’s why I am a leader of men.” The woods are still full of war, and hunting is its reminder. The fact that almost all the hunters are white, and that they tend to be contemptuous of Asians, makes the parallels to war yet more apparent. This theme was even more consequential for Hmong pickers, who, unlike most Cambodians, identify as hunters as well as hunted. During the U.S.-Indochina War, the Hmong became the front line of the U.S. invasion of Laos. Recruited by General Vang Pao, whole villages gave up agriculture to subsist on CIA airdrops of food. The men called in U.S. bombers, putting their bodies on the line so that Americans 90 Chapter 6 could destroy the country from the skies.1 It is not surprising that this policy exacerbated tensions between the Lao targets of the bombing and the Hmong. Hmong refugees have done relatively well in the United States, but war memories run strong. The landscapes of wartime Laos are very much alive for Hmong refugees, and this shapes both the politics of freedom and freedom’s everyday activities. Consider the case of Hmong hunter and U.S. Army sharpshooter Chai Soua Vang. In November 2004, he climbed into a deer blind in a Wisconsin forest just as the white landowners were touring the property. The landowners confronted him, telling him to leave. It seems they shouted racial epithets, and someone shot at him. In response, he shot eight of them with his semiautomatic rifle, killing six. The story was news, and the main tenor in which it was told was outrage. CBS News quoted local Deputy Tim Zeigle, who said Vang was “chasing after [the landowners] and killing them. He hunted them down.”2 Hmong community spokesmen immediately took their distance from Vang and focused on saving the reputation of the Hmong people. Although younger Hmong spoke up against racism in the trial that followed Vang’s arrest, no one publicly suggested why Vang might have assumed a sharpshooter’s stance to eliminate his adversaries. The Hmong I spoke with in Oregon all seemed to know, and to empathize. What Vang did appeared utterly familiar; he could have been a brother or a father. Although Vang was too young to have participated in the U.S.-Indochina War, his actions showed how well he was socialized in the landscapes of that war. There every man who was not a comrade was an enemy, and war meant to kill or be killed. The elder men of the Hmong community still live very much in the world of these battles; at Hmong gatherings, the logistics of particular battles—the topography, timing, and surprises—are the subject of men’s conversations. One Hmong elder whom I had asked about his life used the opportunity to tell me about how to throw back grenades and what to do if you are shot. The logistics of wartime survival were the substance of his life. Hunting recalls the familiarity of Laos for Hmong in the United States. The Hmong elder explained his coming of age in Laos: as a boy, he had learned to hunt, and he used his hunting skills in jungle fighting. Now in the United States, he teaches his sons how to hunt. Hunting brings Hmong men into a world of tracking, survival, and manhood. War Stories 91 Hmong mushroom pickers are comfortable in the forest because of hunting. Hmong rarely get lost; they use the forest-navigation skills they know from hunting. The forest landscape reminds older men of Laos: Much is different, but there are wild hills and the necessity of keeping your wits about you. Such familiarity brings the older generation back to pick each year; like hunting, this is a chance to remember forest landscapes. Without the sounds and smells of the forest, the elder told me, a man dwindles. Mushroom picking layers together Laos and Oregon, war and hunting. The landscapes of war-torn Laos suffuse present experience. What seemed to me nonsequiturs shocked me into awareness of such layers: I asked about mushrooms, and Hmong pickers answered by telling me of Laos, of hunting, or of war. Tou and his son Ger kindly took my assistant Lue and me for many a matsutake hunt. Ger was an exuberant teacher, but Tou was a quiet elder. As a result, I valued the things he said all the more. One afternoon after a long and pleasurable forage, Tou collapsed into the front seat of the car with a sigh. Lue translated from Hmong. “It’s just like Laos,” Tou said, telling us of his home. His next comment made no sense to me: “But it’s important to have insurance.” It took me the next half hour to figure out what he meant. He offered a story: A relative of his had gone back to Laos for a visit, and the hills had so drawn him that he left one of his souls behind when he returned to the United States. He soon died as a result. Nostalgia can cause death, and then it’s important to have life insurance, because that allows the family to buy the oxen for a proper funeral. Tou was experiencing the nostalgia of a landscape made familiar by hiking and foraging. This is also the landscape of hunting—and of war. As Buddhists, ethnic Lao tend to object to hunting. Instead, Lao are the businessmen of the mushroom camps. Most Southeast Asian mushroom buyers are Lao. In the campgrounds, Lao have opened noodle tents, gambling, karaoke, and barbeque shops. Many of the Lao pickers I met originated from or were displaced to Laotian cities. They are often lost in the woods. But they enjoy the risks of mushroom picking and explain it as an entrepreneurial sport. 92 Chapter 6 I first started thinking about cultural engagements with war when I was hanging out with Lao pickers. Camouflage is popular among Lao men. Most are further covered by protective tattoos—some gained in the army, some in gangs, and some in martial arts. Lao rowdiness is the justification for Forest Service rules that disallow gunfire in the campgrounds. Compared with other picker groups, the Lao I met seemed less wounded by the actual moment of war—and yet more involved in its simulation in the forest. But what is a wound? U.S. bombing in Laos displaced 25 percent of the rural population, forcing fleeing refugees into cities—and, when possible, abroad.3 If Lao refugees in the United States have some characteristics of camp followers, is this not also a wound? Some Lao pickers grew up in army families. Sam’s father served in the Royal Lao Army; he was set to follow in his father’s footsteps by enlisting in the U.S. Army. The fall before his recruitment he joined some friends for a last hurrah—picking mushrooms. He made so much money that he called off his army plans. He even brought his parents to pick. He also discovered the pleasures of illegal picking one season when he made $3,000 in one day by trespassing on national park lands. Like white pickers, the Lao I knew looked for out-of-bounds and hidden matsutake patches. (In contrast, Cambodian, Hmong, and Mien pickers more often used careful observation in well-known common spots.) Lao pickers also—again like whites—took pleasure in boasting of their forays outside the law and their ability to get out of scrapes. (Other pickers went outside the law more quietly.) As entrepreneurs, Lao were mediators, with all the pleasures and dangers of mediation. In my own inexperience, I found the entrepreneurial grasp of combat readiness a confusing set of juxtapositions. Yet I could tell it somehow worked as advocacy for high-risk enterprise. Thong, a strong and handsome man in his mid-thirties, seemed to me a man of contradictions: a fighter, a fine dancer, a reflective thinker, a judgmental critic. Because of his strength, Thong picks in high, inaccessible places. He told of his encounter with a policeman who stopped him for speeding one night more than forty miles from the mushroom camp. He told the policeman to go ahead and impound his car; he would walk through the frozen night. The policeman gave in, he said, and let him go. When Thong said that mushroom pickers are in the War Stories 93 forest to escape warrants, I thought he might be speaking for himself. So, too, until quite recently he was married. In the process of getting a divorce, he quit a well-paying job to pick mushrooms. At the least, I believe he aimed to escape the obligations of child support. The contradictions multiply. He went out of his way to express contempt for pickers who abandon their children for the forest. He is not in touch with his children. Meta thinks a lot about Buddhism. Meta spent two years in a monastery; returned to the world, he works to renounce material things. Mushroom picking is a way to do this work of renunciation. Most of his belongings are in his car. Money comes to him easily but disappears just as easily. He does not mire himself in possession. This does not mean he is ascetic in a Western sense. When he is drunk, he sings a tender tenor karaoke. Only among Lao pickers did I meet children of mushroom pickers who, as adults, became mushroom pickers themselves. Paula first came picking with her parents, who later moved to Alaska. But she maintains her parents’ social networks in the Oregon forests, thus earning the room for maneuver claimed by much more seasoned pickers. Paula is daring. She and her husband arrived ready to pick ten days before the U.S. Forest Service opened the season. When the police caught them with mushrooms in their truck, her husband pretended that he couldn’t speak English, while Paula berated the officials. Paula is cute and looks like a child; she can get away with more sass than others. Still, I was surprised at the chutzpah she claimed. She said she dared the police to interfere with her activities. They asked her where she found the mushrooms. “Under green trees.” Where were these green trees? “All trees are green trees,” she insisted. Then she pulled out her cell phone and started calling her supporters. What is freedom? U.S. immigration policy differentiates “political refugees” from “economic refugees,” granting asylum only to the former. This requires immigrants to endorse “freedom” as a condition of their entry. Southeast Asian Americans had the opportunity to learn such endorsements in refugee camps in Thailand, where many spent years preparing themselves for U.S. immigration. As the Lao buyer quoted at the beginning of this chapter quipped in explaining why he picked the United States rather than France: “In France they have two 94 Chapter 6 kinds, freedom and communist. In the U.S. they just have one kind: freedom.” He went on to say that he prefers mushroom picking to a steady job with a good income—he has been a welder—because of the freedom. Lao strategies for enacting freedom contrast sharply with those of the other picker group that vies for the title “most harassed by the law”: Latinos. Latino pickers tend to be undocumented migrants who fit mushroom foraging into a year-round schedule of outdoor work. During mushroom season many live hidden in the forest instead of in the legally required industrial camps and motels where identification and picking permits might be checked. Those I knew had multiple names, addresses, and papers. Mushroom arrests could lead not just to fines but also to loss of vehicles (for faulty papers) and deportation. Instead of sassing the law, Latino pickers tried to stay out of the way, and, if caught, juggle papers and sources of legitimation and support. In contrast, most Lao pickers, as refugees, are citizens and, embracing freedom, hustle for more room. Contrasts such as these motivated my search to understand the cultural engagements with war that shape the practices of freedom of white veterans and Cambodian, Hmong, and Lao refugees. Veterans and refugees negotiate American citizenship through endorsing and enacting freedom. In this practice, militarism is internalized; it infuses the landscape; it inspires strategies of foraging and entrepreneurship. Among commercial matsutake pickers in Oregon, freedom is a “boundary object,” that is, a shared concern that yet takes on many meanings and leads in varied directions.4 Pickers arrive every year to search out matsutake for Japanese-sponsored supply chains because of their overlapping yet diverging commitments to the freedom of the forest. Pickers’ war experiences motivate them to come back year after year to extend their living survival. White vets enact trauma; Khmer heal war wounds; Hmong remember fighting landscapes; Lao push the envelope. Each of these historical currents mobilizes the practice of picking mushrooms as the practice of freedom. Thus, without any corporate recruitment, training, or discipline, mountains of mushrooms are gathered and shipped to Japan.

[eng200fandoms-blog]

Sijia Yu

Ms. Goode

ENG 200

8. Feb. 2018

                                    Fandom of Miyazaki Hayao

           I am a super fan of Miyazaki Hayao, who is one of the best and most famous film directors, animators, producers, authors, manga artists and screenwriters in Japan, even all over the world. Each of his films is well-known among various age levels and inspired a great number of people as well. I admire Miyazaki Hayao for three reasons, his films, his attitude to life and his politics. I believe if you learn enough about him, you will be one of the fans of his.

           Miyazaki Hayao was born in Tokyo, Japan. He loves reading and has been very talented in drawing since he was really young. He found himself interested in comics deeply, so he committed himself to drawing what he liked and he has maintained this passion his whole life. He started to learn how to draw professionally when he was in high school. Interestingly, even though drawing was an irreplaceable part of his life, which he knew clearly, he did not study in a relative major in college. Surprisingly, he chose to learn about politics. Most people indicate that Miyazaki Hayao’s political life was affected by his mother and the whole environment when he was living then. He did not quit drawing, it just was not a major focus at that time. He joined a club which had the closest relationship with animation and created several works in his spare time. He has changed his work location several times since he graduated, and during this period, he met one of the most significant figures in his life, both in his personal life and career, whose name is Takahata Isao.In the middle of 1985, Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao established their own studio, Ghibli, in order to cooperate more conveniently and perfectly. Under the run of this studio, they produced Castle In the Sky, Princess Mononke, Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo On the Cliff, The Wind Rises and so on. Each product has its own story and plots, with different kind of attractive roles. Among these, The Wind Rises, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle won the Oscar Awards respectively. In my perspective, Totoro, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle are my favorites, and I have watched Spirited Away four times. Every time I can obtain some new thoughts from the movie, which is one of the most amazing and inspiriting parts I learn from Miyazaki Hayao.

           First of all, I found that his films are able to satisfy all age levels of audience. A lot of people state that animations are only for the children however, Miyazaki Hayao takes advantage in his own way telling the world that the animations are not limited to children only, it is facing all the crowd no matter which age you are. If you are a child, you can enjoy the beautiful scenes and cute roles in the film. If you are the young, you will acquire enlightenment from the films. If you are kind of experienced about life, you will find some common ground in the films. So different generation can watch the same film but feel differently meanwhile. Another astonishing aspect of Miyazaki Hayao’s films is that he and his group insist upon drawing by hand over the years, and a lot of scenes in the films are exactly existing in the reality, which is totally the same with the real life. In other words, you can track back the scene from the screen right to the real occasions. There are a lot of people starting games about finding the real buildings and streets in Japan or Taiwan based on the scenes in the films. It is like remote connections of his fans all over the world, gathering fans to do the same interesting things in the different time period or same time in various plots. Under the situation of high-tech movies separation, their insistence looks pure and valuable.

           Secondly, Miyazaki Mayao has a very positive attitude toward his life, reflecting by his products partly as well.  He is good at observing the details of life and characters, showing his found to the audience, and letting them know what they have missed in their lives. Every time when there are some disasters, or something happened in Japan, he will donate his fortune to help the people who are in need at the first time. He and his co-workers attend to the damaged site or shelters themselves to comfort the victims.

           Last but not least, as a Japanese, Miyazaki Mayao stands as absolutely objective politic opinion publicly, compared to the leaders of Japan. Miyazaki Mayao is unique, as a Japanese citizen, because unlike many high-profile Japanese people he takes a clear stance arguing that Japan needs to apologize for some of its crimes during the past, which most Japanese leaders choose to deny or are silent about. It seems that Japan is always under some controversial arguments due to their political standing, such as they deny their cruel and inhuman actions to the comfort women or they try to hide and cover the history what they have done to Chinese, especially in Nan Jing to their new generations. As a public figure with high reputation, he pointed that the leaders of Japan ought to apologize and be shamed for what they did to the women in the past wars, which truth are admitted by Chinese, Korean, American and part of Japanese but the leaders of Japan, for now, deny facing it and are trying to erase the history. Miyazaki Mayao did not avoid the sensitive topic when he was interviewed by the press, on the contrary, he indicated his standpoint clearly form the truth and justice. His actions earned him more respect than before. He taught us that no matter who you are, where you are from, what other people say, there are some principles and baselines which are unbridgeable. He is going further than an artist.

           Every fan of Miyazaki Hayao is long for visiting his Ghibli studio, which is located in a comfortable and peaceful community in Tokyo. These fans love not only Miyazaki’s writing and artwork in his movies, they also love the music in the films created by his co-worker Joe Hisaishi. For many of his movies, they are not as powerful without the music that accompanies them. So when fans visit the studio, they are not only looking at Miyazaki’s work but also that of Joe Hisaishi. It is like the temple of God in fans’ mind because we will have the opportunity to visit his workroom and appreciating his manuscripts by ourselves. There are also some exhibitions in the studio showing the audience the process of making an animation. It is like a grand party for all the Miyazaki Mayao’s fans. Miyazaki Mayao has a very helpful and famous partner during his film life, Joe Hisaishi, Japanese composer and musician as the national treasure. He wrote plenty of beautiful songs for the films, and his songs are popular among the fans as well. Every once in a while, Joe Hisaishi holds a concert about playing the songs which are made for the movies all over the world. At that time, it is another way that the fans gathered together and pilgrimage their adoring person together.

           Even though Miyazaki Mayao said he wanted to retire for too many times to convince people, his creation and passion are staying the same as the past. He is fortunate as he is capable to combine his hobby and his work together, making a living for them and inspiriting his audience all over the world. Apparently, his fortunate cannot exist alone without his effort. He said he retired again recently. Then the people who love him started to ask when he would come back with his new work. Several decades past, and no matter when, he, his work, his co-workers, as well the lesson we learned from him, will last for good. The classic will not be shaded by the time, it will shine more brightly.