This conversation took place outside of Tsuruoka, Yamagata, in northwestern Japan, in November 2023. We were on a tour sharing information from struggles in the US — the George Floyd Uprising of 2020, the struggle against Cop City in the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, Georgia, and our own attempts to live communally and in deeper relation with the land. We were hosted by our friend Masanori Naruse, who is a yamabushi monk and harvester of wild foods. The conversation mostly speaks for itself, but some context may be helpful.
First, this conversation takes place in the very long wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck northeastern Japan; the earthquake and the tsunami that followed claimed nearly 16,000 lives, and caused the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, releasing radioactive contamination throughout the region and into the ocean. The immediate effects were devastating, and the longer term contamination persists. Tsuruoka lies to the northwest of Fukushima, on the other side of Mt. Gassan — one of the three sacred peaks of the Dewasanzan, and a primary character in this conversation. As mentioned below, the mass of Gassan blocked a substantial part of the radiation, and so many people migrated to Yamagata prefecture to begin new lives in less irradiated zones. Another concept that informs this conversation is that of “zero-becquerelism”, a political position that emerged in Japan post-Fukushima which posits that no amount of radiation is safe, and people should take the maximum distance possible from radioactive contamination. Zero-becquerelists conceive of the irradiated region as hazardous land that the state is trying to bind people to with deception about the risks. A different understanding unfolds in the conversation below.
Questions of safety and risk, of the Japanese state’s perception of mountains and sea as hazardous and requiring physical separation, accompanied us on our entire journey. Prior to visiting Yamagata, we visited the regions most directly affected by the tsunami, Fukushima and Sendai. On the Oshika Peninsula, small fishing communities are now surrounded by enormous concrete sea-walls. These walls simultaneously block their view of the sea and prevent easy access to their boats — boats which villagers used to take refuge in during earthquakes, heading out to sea to avoid the large waves close to shore. On Mt. Gassan, where Masanori took us foraging for mushrooms, Tsukinosawa (Moon Creek) is regularly punctuated by concrete dams. As in our own home, the dams interfere with river ecology and prevent salmon from traveling upstream to their traditional spawning grounds. These dams are everywhere throughout Japan, thanks to massive development funding by the state; not only for hydroelectricity and reservoirs, but to control the flow of water, every major waterway in the country is dammed, and rivers have banks of concrete. In the same way, to prevent landslides, entire mountain sides are covered with concrete. In this context — where mountain forests were nearly totally replaced by monoculture plantations, where concrete is ubiquitously used to separate people from nature — Masanori’s attempt to think differently about relating to the Earth through yamabushi practice carries particular resonance. Yamabushi, or mountain ascetics, are part of a syncretic practice known as Shugendo, unique to Japan, which blends elements of Buddhism, Shinto, and local animist traditions.
Finally, this text has been substantially edited. The original conversation was bilingual, with our interpreter Hajime performing linguistic wonders between the very different contexts of English and Japanese. In addition to his incredible ability to listen to long monologues and then interpret seamlessly, he brought a poetry and sensitivity to language and experience that clearly shines through. One of the joys of communicating across our language divide was uncovering the common knowledge shared by both. We spent a substantial amount of time trying to figure out which plants we were talking about, each breakthrough accompanied by a joyful recognition that we knew the same plants or at least their cousins, that our relation to the Earth allowed us to recognize each others’ worlds despite the language barrier.
This conversation only scratches the surface of what we have to discuss. We hope to connect again.
Tsuruoka, Yamagata prefecture, Japan
I wanted to open this by saying that this has been a really life-changing, incredible experience to meet you and to visit you here. To see your context, and to understand the differences between our lives across the ocean. I’m really interested in your yamabushi practice. The other day you were talking about your initiation, the ritual death process. I think that would be an interesting place to start. Both to hear about the practical elements, but also as much as you’re willing to share about your personal experience.
These days I think of different ways of explaining yamabushi, and what yamabushi do, to people who don’t know about it. The difference between yamabushi and other people who climb mountains, hike, backpack… the easiest way to differentiate is that we pray to the mountain shrine, while other people just climb. But the thought I have now is: backpackers usually wear clothes, Gore Tex stuff that protects them from the environment, creates a barrier, so there’s a kind of space that’s between the outside space and your body. It’s blocking, protection from rain, or you sweat and the sweat would be absorbed by the clothing and evaporate. But yamabushi perceive it totally differently. When it rains, they would say oh, this is good, this is a purification ceremony, we have good rain, we can cleanse ourselves. It’s good shugyo1 , an ascetic practice. It’s good practice, a good opportunity. Or if it’s really hot, and we sweat profusely, then the yamabushi would say, this is a good opportunity to practice, because the sweat will wash away our filth. It’s kind of happy-go-lucky, but that’s how it is. We have only thin clothing, just one layer. You only have cell walls between you and the environment, and there’s this kind of osmosis going on with your body and the environment. Other people build a barrier and prevent this osmotic exchange. Maybe our yamabushi way is to reduce the osmotic pressure to zero, to become one with the world. You leave this framework that you’re human. You become one with the mountain, or one with Buddha, or one with the universe, that kind of thing.
Another way of explaining the difference between hikers and yamabushi: people who climb mountains, they are a living human being going up the physical mountain, the mountain as a physical object. You take a hike and come back, right? But yamabushi think of the mountain as a place of transformation. It’s another world, the mountain is another world, or a mother, the body of the mother. It’s where you are reborn, as something other than human. So it’s not that you are on the same plane and you just come back, but you go to the other side of this plane, and you become the dead, and then you’re reborn as a baby. And this kind of transformation or revolution, is like a turning of the plane, upside down. That’s the best way of perceiving this mountain, completely different from recreational climbers.
What mountain do you have this relationship with?
Mount Haguro.
How did you start to go in the direction of becoming yamabushi?
When I was in elementary school we had a course in ethics. They would teach that we need to protect nature, but I thought there was something really strange about that, something was wrong. Nature is something they think they can control or protect, it’s very moralistic. You need to do this or that to protect this fragile Earth. But I wanted to know, what is it like to be a butterfly or a spider, how would they perceive the world? How would the world appear from the perspective of an insect?
I wanted to express animism through animation. I worked at a factory to raise money to go to an animation school in Montreal. But when I went there, the university was kind of a technical school. So I quit and came back. Animation is perceived as childish in most places, but Japanese animation has a cosmic worldview.
So I thought, maybe what I’m interested in is philosophy, or thought. I encountered writing by Shinichi Nakazawa. He’s a unique writer and anthropologist, who wrote about death and rebirth through yamabushi. I looked him up and he taught at Chuo University, so I went to that school. I started going to his lectures, and eventually I approached him. I asked him, “teacher, you know about yamabushi?” So we organized a summer camp to go visit a yamabushi shukubo2 , and we stayed two nights. The yamabushi who ran that camp, he wouldn’t explain anything but he would blow his conch and say “go climb that mountain,” or “get in that waterfall.” I felt really great after going through this. It felt like I was a t-shirt freshly washed and dried out on a sunny day, without any wrinkles. It was a great experience. Of course I went back to Tokyo and this sensation disappeared as time went by. But still it remained with me. I kept asking myself, why was that? What happened? So I kept going year after year. The sensation kind of fermented in me.
Eventually I got a master’s degree and studied the natural philosophy of Schelling. What I realized was that there are two ways of thinking about nature. One is binary, you have humans on one side and nature on the other side. The other way of thinking is monism, that humans are part of nature. But with the first way of thinking, you need to negotiate a kind of settlement between humans and nature. Like, maybe you can say nature has rights, or maybe you have some kind of contract between nature and humans. But this way of thinking has a limitation. The other way of thinking also has a limitation: how is it that humans act on their own? How do they have freedom? Then we have to ask, how is it that humans destroy nature? And then, that also becomes a part of nature, like nature destroying itself. So how do you think about the anti-natureness of human beings? How do you think about something like nuclear plants?
Maybe to break this impasse of these two ways of thinking, we need to develop a way of thinking that’s neither-nor. Or both, at the same time. Anyway, I only studied Schelling for two years, so I’m not an expert, but it gave me a kind of basis for how to think about the nature-human question. But I didn’t feel like I could resolve this problem by just becoming an academic. I thought I needed a more concrete grounding in actual place-ness and practice.
So I visited this place in Fukuoka, where they practice satoyama, food-forestry. They harvest a lot of materials from the forest. I also visited a place in Chiba where they practice no-till farming. And I noticed with no-till agriculture, their way of growing rice is that they don’t use any herbicide or pesticide. They don’t need to because they put water in the rice paddy throughout winter, and then there are all these small earthworms, very thin. Their dung forms a thin layer on top of the rice paddy that prevents weeds from growing. This farming practice also makes rice stronger by growing it in cold weather. It’s different from conventional agriculture. The stalks grow thicker. This is making rice wild again. Returning rice to its wildness, not just a cultivar.
It’s the same thing as yamabushi practice, what yamabushi do. Sometimes they fast, they don’t use toothbrushes, and this is yamabushi trying to self-savagize. When people talk about protecting nature, they’re seeing nature as an object. But with yamabushi, you are developing nature in human beings in a different modality.
Another turn in my path in developing my relationship with the mountains was when I met Haga-san, the owner of a lodge on Mt. Gassan. I started going into the mountains with him, and he showed me how to harvest mushrooms and sansai, mountain vegetables. There’s no inherent connection between foraging for sansai and yamabushi ascetic practice, but both of them are part of how I relate to the wild.
I also organized a yamabushi practice camp in the summer there, in the Dewasanzan. Those are the three mountains: Gassan, Hagurosan, and Yudonosan. Now I also am independently doing a yamabushi practice tour every year. I run an organization called Hijirisha. Hijiri is kind of a proto-yamabushi. So those hijiri who went to the mountain, they became yamabushi. But there were also those who wandered around in the mountains, villages and towns, like itinerant artists. Hijiri means knowing the day, or knowing the sun. To know the day is to know the calendar, which means to be able to perform the rituals and festivals.
You said something about feeling like you needed to be situated in a particular place to make a connection, to orient yourself. I resonate with that a lot. I’m curious if you could talk about your relation to specific places, or the yamabushi relation to specific places, like Mt. Gassan or Mt. Haguro, and how you think about the importance of place in your practice.
Being in a place is very important. For yamabushi there are sacred mountains, like in the Hokuriku region they have Hakusan; in the Kansai region they have Ominesan, which is between Yoshino and Kumano; in Kyushu there is Hikosan. And of course in Tohoku there’s the Dewasanzan. So there are certain sacred mountains which have been connected to yamabushi practice for hundreds of years.For me personally, I am connected with the mountains here, the Dewasanzan. It wasn’t immediate. Before I lived here, some years ago I was living in Fukui prefecture, and I first experienced akinomine. Akinomine is a very old, authentic yamabushi ritual, which is practiced in its oldest form at the Shozenin temple in the Dewasanzan. It takes place in the mountains. It lasts for nine days, there is chanting. It is an ancient ritual. So while I was still living in Fukui, I first joined akinomine, and I was coming once every two months to the Dewasanzan. But something wasn’t right. Only later, after I moved and started to live here, did I begin to sense that the mountain is here. Hagurosan is here, the being of the mountain is in me. The mountain started residing in me. It felt right. It’s the same with harvesting wild plants and mushrooms. I feel that they give life, and I get life from them. They make me live.
Also when I did the akinomine practice, I started collecting wild plants, but that was only nine days at a time. Now it’s part of my life. It’s also what sustains me as work. When I go to harvest wild plants in spring, it’s so beautiful, the creek that cascades over rocks, a cliff with snow melting and greens sprouting, kogomi fern sprouting up, all these new fresh greens and water splashing in the creek. The wind is being born in this space, and you feel the life that’s been dormant, pressurized by snow, coming up, springing up. You feel the energy of life, you sense the happiness of the place. And this is also my work, but I really feel happy, like I get to be here again. I’m so happy to be here in spring. It’s euphoric.
And when the mushroom season ends, the long winter comes, and thinking of its severity you feel low. As the season transitions the sun travels in a lower angle, casting its light through the susuki grass. The light comes from this low angle, and you see these late season grass seed-heads, you see the light coming through them, and their shape looks like an old person, bowed over, aging. Life is entering this stage. So I leave the mountain, that’s it for the year, and I don’t know how to express it… I am overwhelmed by this feeling I can’t put into words. So even though this is my work, the place is so special.
But I want to start speaking about radiation.
Yes! That’s what I was just about to ask about.
Radiation contamination is something that people worry about, and therefore people don’t collect wild plants. I was harvesting wild plants — at first just wild plants, not mushrooms — in 2012 after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. But I was measuring the radiation, and the seeds of buna, a kind of beech tree, and the sprouts of koshiabura, a kind of aralia tree, a mountain vegetable. They were contaminated at the time. And even though Gassan blocked the spread of radioactive contaminants from Fukushima, these numbers came up in the measurements.
I am careful with radiation because I sell these things to people that I know. So I need to keep that in mind. But at the same time, I have a different feeling about gathering wild plants and mushrooms. In the place that we went together, Tsukinosawa, Moon Creek, we have these trees over 200 years old, beech and oak, and you just walk into these old forests, then you see all these mushrooms. There is an unbelievable sense of time. With the old trees, these mushrooms are like microbes that rot the trees, and it takes decades for them to weaken the tree, and also vines grow up the tree and the tree gets weaker and weaker, and eventually with a gust of wind it will fall. This is a process that has taken place for thousands of years in this area, in this mountain range, which rose up between 300,000 and 700,000 years ago. And this has continued for such a long period, for eons. And so then when a tree falls you see this area where the sunlight can come in and another tree would grow up in this space. So the temporality of this place, and how its time works out in such slowness, gives a sense of depth and richness that’s inexpressible, a solemn feeling. This is a very different sense from this other discourse on radiation, the dimension is very different. It’s time that you feel with your body. It’s divine time, it’s beyond human control. And this flow of time is totally different, but it’s very concrete, something embodied.
This feeling, when I have this feeling, this kind of tactility, I can’t let go. I want to be on the side of mountains, rather than the general way of perceiving that this is dangerous, and this is beyond this certain threshold, and that kind of judgment — it doesn’t feel right with me. I would like to go into the earth, and grasp something, rather than having a kind of objective distance and taking a sample from what’s out there. I want to feel something beneath the ground. For example you have these microbes that live near roots, that capture nutrients for the plants. The perspective of these microbes, that’s what I want to grasp, and that’s how I want to perceive the world. So it’s not whether there is a certain level of radiation or not, I want to get close to the root of it, and dig it up from the ground, and that’s the sense that I choose, that I want to be with. And that’s how I want to continue my practice.
Is this something that you thought at the time, after Fukushima, or is it something that you look back on now and think about?
Actually I started gathering wild plants before the earthquake and the nuclear disaster, in 2009. At the time, I could not put it into this type of words. But I had this sense at the time, there was so much talk on TV and social media about radiation, but when I entered the forest, especially in the fall, it’s so quiet. It’s like it’s being absorbed by winter, so quiet that you can hear the leaf of a tree, a giant leaf all dried up, and it crackles as it falls and as it touches the branches and the stem, so loud, you can hear it, it’s so loud, that’s how quiet it was. And you only hear the wind blowing over your head, and your footsteps, that’s all you hear. So this quietness really made it clear, this sense. And of course there’s this side of me too, looking at smartphones, but being in the forest for thousands of years is very different. I would go with Haga-san to pick mushrooms, you see nameko on the wood, so many of them sprouting. And Haga-san would say, go check on that tree, from a distance of like 30 meters. And you’d say, there’s no way you can see the mushrooms from that distance. But sure enough you go there and you see the mushrooms. And all he said is to go check on that tree. I felt that Haga-san had this embodied sense about mushrooms, like the direction of the tree, how it fell, the amount of fungi and wind, all these things that are in him that inform him that mushrooms are there. It’s not something that there’s a manual or something written up in that sense, but all he had is this sense of time that accumulated in him, the flow of time. And there were many before him that had this sense, many people. So I was really impressed by this culture of the mountain, and I really resonated and felt this sense of respect.
But this kind of thing is completely erased when you just talk about radiation. So therefore to me it’s very important to be able to gather in the mountains without any sense of hesitation or remorse, and the fact that the nuclear power plant threatens this shows the violence of nuclear energy. It’s a very different temporality and sense of duration, the flow of time is completely different. The general sense about gathering wild plants that may be contaminated by radiation, is generally perceived as bad. And now that no radioactive materials have been detected recently, other people are foraging again too. But the problematic of radiation remains. So I don’t have an answer, what to do or what’s the right thing. I only have this sense of discomfort, like something is weird. And I just keep asking myself questions.
We should take a break, we’ve been talking for a long time and our interpreter is tired. But we have so much to talk about, we have so much to learn from you. Maybe radiation is a strange example of this, but one way that state formations accumulate power is by this exact separation of people from the land. Their power is to create dispossession through both conceptually and physically separating people from nature.
A few years ago, some other friends from Japan told me about the Fukushima disaster. They relayed this sentiment from survivors they had spoken to, who said that they weren’t sure that they could trust the land anymore because of the radiation. Of course that’s completely understandable because radiation is deeply dangerous, but I couldn’t help but feel a sense that there was something very upsetting. It felt wrong in me, because it’s not the land that has lost trust. The land didn’t do anything distrustful, it’s the industrial contamination that is causing this loss of trust. And further, to address the temporality of the land, and the temporality of the people who have known the land forever, and the temporality of radiation — if we just say that we can’t have this relation with the land anymore, then we’re talking about letting go of the relationships that have evolved us into humans, and the people who we are. So this is just to say that this practice that you have is deeply necessary in the world. It’s a really deep form of resistance and fighting, and I’m really grateful to meet you.