ABSTRACT
Matsutake, the charismatic wild mushroom highly valued in Japan, can thrive in conditions created in part by humans, but nonetheless it has evaded centuries of human effort at deliberate cultivation. This chapter considers a recent “artificial cultivation” project and how it has been shaped by the particular social and environmental conditions resulting from Japan’s rapid industrialization in the twentieth century. It focuses particularly on scientists’ engagement with multiple interspecies and intraspecies translation processes, and on a scientist’s visit to a forest cared for by a matsutake “meister,” a farmer famous for exceptional skills in producing matsutake by affectively attuning to various beings in the forest. Ethnographic observation of the scientists’ practices elucidates the multidimensionality of their attempts at translation. Such attempts could ambivalently result in successful manipulation of the fungus for capitalist resource extraction and yet simultaneously in the cultivation of interspecies care involved in co-habitation. The chapter discusses how the attention to that multidimensionality elucidates the complex quotidian politics among various world-making practices.
