Read The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins for Free Online Page A

I found a different group of matsutake pickers: Japanese Americans. Despite many differences from my Chinese American background, Japanese Americans felt familiar to me, like family. Yet this ease struck me sharply, a splash ofcold water. I realized that something huge and perplexing had happened to U.S. citizenship between early- and late-twentieth-century immigrations. A wild new cosmopolitanism has inflected what it means to be an American: a jostling of unassimilated fragments of cultural agendas and political causes from around the world. My surprise, then, was not the ordinary shock of cultural difference. American precarity—living in ruins—is in this unstructured multiplicity, this uncongealed confusion. No longer a melting pot, we live with unrecognizable others. And if I tell this story within Asian American worlds, do not think it stops there. This cacophony is the feel of precarious living for both white and colored Americans—with repercussions around the world. It is most clearly seen, however, in relation to its alternatives, such as assimilation.
    The first people to go “matsutake crazy” in Oregon were Japanese who came to the region in that short window of opportunity between the banishment of the Chinese in 1882 and the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” stopping Japanese immigration in 1907. 2 Some of the first Japanese immigrants worked as loggers and found matsutake in the forest. When they settled into farming, they returned to the forest every season: for warabi ferns in the spring, fuki shoots in the summer, and matsutake in the fall. By the early twentieth century, matsutake outings—picnic lunches with matsutake foraging—were a popular leisure activity, as celebrated in the poem that opens this chapter.
    Uriuda’s poem is a useful signpost of both pleasures and dilemmas. The matsutake hunters drive cars into the mountains; they are enthusiastic Americans even as they retain Japanese sensibilities. Like others who ventured out of Meiji Japan, the immigrants were serious translators, learning other cultures. Beside themselves, they became children—in both American and Japanese ways. Then something changed: World War II.
    Since arriving in the United States, Japanese had struggled over bans against citizenship and land ownership. Despite this, they had succeeded at farming—especially with labor-intensive fruits and vegetables, such as cauliflower, which needed to be shaded from light, and berries, which needed hand picking. World War II broke that trajectory, removing them from their farms. Oregon’s Japanese Americans were interned in “War Relocation Camps.” Their citizenship dilemmas were turned inside out.
    I first heard Uriuda’s poem sung in Japanese in a classical style during a gathering of Japanese Americans celebrating their matsutake heritage in 2006. The elderly man who sang it had first learned classical singing when he was interned in the camps. Indeed, many “Japanese” hobbies flourished there. But even as it was possible to pursue Japanese hobbies, the camps changed what it meant to be Japanese in the United States. When they came back after the war, most had lost access to their possessions and their farms. (Juliana Hu Pegues notes that the same year Japanese American farmers were sent away to camps, the United States opened the Bracero program to bring in Mexican farm laborers.) 3 They were treated with suspicion. In response, they did their best to become model Americans.
    As one man recalled, “We stayed away from everything Japanese-y. If you had a pair of [Japanese] slippers, you left them at the door when you went out.” Japanese daily habits were not for public display. Young people stopped learning Japanese. Total immersion into American culture was expected, without bicultural extensions, and children led the way. Japanese Americans became “200 percent American.” 4 At the same time, Japanese arts had flourished in the camps. Traditional poetry and music,