= The Korean Baekje Origins of Pine Mushrooms in Japan =
How can a pine tree named as ‘Japanese Red Pine’ be native to Korea and not Japan? And the same for matsutake mushroom? What are the facts and the hidden history?
As suspected, matsutake mushroom does indeed come from ancient Koreans. Japanese history reveals that ancient Koreans were held responsible for having transplanted Korean red pines into Japan thereby introducing Korean 송이버섯 song-i beoseot mushroom to the island. The esteemed red pine tree and pine mushroom are native to Korea, not to Japan where it was introduced.
Just by examining something as unsuspectingly mundane as matsutake mushrooms, the hidden deeper historical Korean origins come to the surface. Many Japanese food ingredients are inextricably tied to much broader distortions of hidden Korean culture and history within Japanese history.
The special red pine trees did not cross actually from Korea through the land bridges that once connected Japan into a coastline (the island had yet to separate at that prehistoric point in time). The Baekdudaegan Refugium kept the Korean pine trees and many other plant species within the Korean Peninsula through the Ice Age. The Korean red and black pine trees are very old natives to the peninsula and northern regions above surrounding Baekdusan mountain still sacred to Koreans.
Korean pine trees were actually introduced by ancient Koreans to Japan, according to research by the USDA Forest Service.
“Essentially, the red and black pines introduced from the Korean Peninsula flourished in the past under conditions no longer existing in Japan.”
A Japanese professor explains the Korean origin of Japanese obsession of matsutake mushrooms. The explanation blames Koreans for cutting down forests and reforesting with imported Korean red pine trees. Civilizing ancient Korean Baekje was responsible for transplanting the Korean red pine trees to Japan in order to grow symbolic wood to build temples and recreate the landscape in clearings around Nara out of homesickness. By introducing host pine trees, the pine mushroom was also introduced. The matsutake authority professor’s explanation is suggestive of this history of ancient Koreans disrupting matsutake-less Japan.
The Mushroom at the End of the World
Anna Tsing
https://books.google.com/books?id=y3KYD … ea&f=false
(Page 49)
Dr. Ogawa savors nostalgia with considerable irony and laughter. As we stood in the rain beside the matasuke-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 deforestations, and with them matsutake.
Koreans smelled the matsutake — and they though 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.
Baekje: In Search of Traces of the Lost Kingdom
https://www.koreana.or.kr/user/0006/nd1 … ng=English
Matsutake since Baekje colonization was reserved for the Japanese aristocracy up to Meiji Japan. Temples continued to be the main procurers of the elite only delicacy.
The ancient Japanese mindset developed weird connotations about the mushroom so that it was offensive for women to say “matsutake” aloud in public. If the word must be uttered, women had to attach “o-” in front. The excessively crude vulgarity with mushrooms in the Japanese populace at large must have been from the bizarre minded Jomon roots that sought mushrooms for psychedelic usage.
In 1905, a strange pine wilt disease due to a Japanese borne nematode started to wipe out pine forests in Japan. With the destruction of pine trees across the island nation, matsutake introduced centuries ago by Baekje died out with the ailing host trees.
Ecology and Management of Commercially Harvested American Matsutake Mushroom
USDA Forest Service
1997
https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr412.pdf
History
Matsutake have been used and revered by the Japanese people for more than a millennium and have become more than just a seasonal delicacy. They also symbolize fertility, and by extension, good fortune and happiness. A gift of matsutake is considered special and is cherished by those who receive it.
According to Ohara (1994), one of the earliest records extolling its virtues is found in a 759 A.D. poem. Later references to matsutake often were related to activities of nobles and priests. Records from the 13th to 17th centuries indicate that nobility enjoyed mushrooming events and often sent matsutake as gifts, a tradition that persists today, especially in the corporate world.
During the 11th century in the Imperial Court of Kyoto, women were prohibited from saying “matsutake” openly but instead were required to speak of it with the honorific marker “O,” as O-Matsu.
Until the 17th and 18th centuries, matsutake consumption was strictly limited to the imperial court.
As matsutake consumption became more common among the public during these centuries, vulgar (phallic symbolism) and graphic short stories came into vogue, portraying comical characters attempting to conceal their matsutake picking areas and indulging in risque talk about the mushroom.
Since 1905, the matsutake forests of Japan have been plagued by the pine nematode or pine weevil.
The nematode is transmitted to living pines by the Japanese pine sawyer, a longhorn beetle Invasion of vascular tissue by the nematode results in wilt and rapid death (Futai 1979, 1980a, 1980b, 1980c, Futai and Furuno 1979). Most host pines of matsutake, including the Japanese black and red pines, are very susceptible to this devastating pathogen. Since the introduction of the nematode at the start of the 20th century on the southern island of Kyushu, it has steadily spread north-eastward
The current blight is the fourth in a series of epidemics since 1905. The third epidemic lasted a decade, peaked in 1979, and caused an estimated loss of 2 4 million cubic meters of pine wood The current epidemic began in 1990, and killed enough trees in one year to build 50,000 houses.
Recent reports indicate that the disease has also spread to forests of Okinawa, Taiwan, South Korea, North Korea, and China. A combination of climatic, socioeconomic, and biological factors in Japan tends to increase the magnitude of the blight. Pine mortality from the nematode often increases after prolonged drought and high temperatures, which weaken the resistance of the pines to the parasite.
Essentially, the red and black pines introduced from the Korean Peninsula flourished in the past under conditions no longer existing in Japan.
Although the Japanese have developed many silvicultural strategies to manage matsutake forests (discussed below), matsutake production has disappeared from the vast stretches of mountain pine forests that die each year Indeed, Japan’s temples and public parks may eventually become the last refuge for matsutake pine forests.
• Inference of pine wilt nematode spread through DNA analysis
• NOTE: Japan “UNSOLVED ORIGIN”, eventually infesting parts of Korea and Manchuria
It seems a native pine wilt disease nematode originated in Japan. The infestation was first reported in 1905. The worm later wound up detected in the United States in 1934, possibly being spread to other parts of the world.
Severely impacted Japan is the main zone of tremendous pine tree devastation and nematode research. With black and red pines being an introduced species, less genetic variation provided less chance of resistance to pine wilt caused by the nematode pine worm weevil.
There was duplicity in scientific naming reported first by Japanese then later by American scientists for the pine weevil. Originally named Japanese weevil, the Japanese got it renamed by sleight of scientific re-classification due to being the same species suggesting an American nematode instead.
“Bursaphelenchus lingnicolous, the Japanese nematode, was re-classified as the American species B. xylophilus in 1981.”
What Wikipedia describes as Japanese pine is a subspecies of Korean pine as a centuries old introduced strain from Korea.
Pine wilt nematode
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bursaph … xylophilus
Pine mortality in Japan was first reported Munemoto Yano (矢野宗幹) in Nagasaki prefecture in 1905.
The nematode was first discovered in the timber of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) in Louisiana, United States. Steiner and Burhrer reported that the nematode was a new species, and they named it Aphelenchoides xylophilus in 1934.
In 1969, Japanese plant pathologists Tomoya Kiyohara (清原友也) and Yozan Tokushige (徳重陽山) discovered many unfamiliar nematodes on dead pine trees around the Kyushu islands in Japan. Then, they experimentally inoculated the nematode to healthy pine and other conifer trees and observed them. The healthy pine trees were killed — especially Japanese red and Japanese Black pine. However, Jack and Loblolly pine, Sugi cedar, and Hinoki cypress trees were able to survive. The researchers concluded that the nematode was the pathogen behind the increase of mortality in Japanese pine trees.
In 1972, the year after the ground-breaking paper of Kiyohara and Tokushige was published, Yasuharu Mamiya (真宮靖治) and T. Kiyohara posited that the nematode was the pathogen behind pine mortality, and that it was a new species. They named it Bursaphelenchus lignicolous.
Bursaphelenchus lingnicolous, the Japanese nematode, was re-classified as the American species B. xylophilus in 1981.
Only by recently reintroducing pine trees again from Korea to infested Japan, which appear to be resistant to the Japanese pine weevil disease, the more robust artificially planted re-introduced Korean pine trees gave Japanese a second chance to restart matsutake harvesting once again.
But due to human depopulation of rural areas, the artificially planted pine forests are being neglected for mushroom cultivation. Matsutake seems to not be a self-sustaining mushroom growing wild and needs human input for propagation in Japan. Matsutake is disappearing from Japan yet again. Even the temples since Baekje times traditionally maintaining procurement of matsutake are barren of the non-native mushroom.
With the ancient Baekje aristocratic legacy driving high demand as a traditional luxury item for elite gifting (bribing), the rarity of good harvests has caused prices in Japan to skyrocket. Other countries are trying to get into the highly profitable market in Japan with South Korea becoming the import price leader. Trafficking more highly prized North Korean song-i beoseot mushrooms seems to be a black market matsutake trade that can only arise in Japan.
Matsutake — Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuta … ailability
The price for matsutake in the Japanese market is highly dependent on quality, availability, and origin. The Japanese matsutake at the beginning of the season, which is the highest grade, can go up to $1,000 per kilogram. In contrast, the average value for imported matsutake is about $90 per kilogram.
The prized mushroom that may help fund Pyongyang
NK News
July 18, 2015
https://www.nknews.org/2015/06/the-priz … pyongyang/
What North Korea has to do with three men arrested in Japan for illicit trafficking of ‘matsutake’
It was early morning on May 12 when Japan’s finest came knocking.In coordinated raids by the police forces of the Kyoto, Kanagawa, Shimane and Yamaguchi prefectures, three portly middle aged and elderly men were taken away in handcuffs and charged with smuggling one of the world’s rarest, most prized mushrooms: the matsutake.
How far has the Japanese attempts to destroy Korean culture gone that the criminally minded effects still persist in the world at large today?
The inferiority gripping Meiji Japan even drove the Japanese to steal Korean pines, long a symbolic treasure to Koreans, even in name as their own Japanese.
The island nation truly was beggarly, driven to waenom dwarf piracy, invasion and colonization to wickedly steal or destroy even the Korean people, culture, language, arts, food, history, land, tigers, and pine trees they so jealously envied across the East Sea of Korea.
Korea’s native plants to find new names
The Korea Times
By Jhoo Dong-chan
2015–08–11
http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article … Idx=184631
The Korea Forest Service has changed the name of the “Japanese red pine,” which was arbitrarily assigned to the trees by Japanese botanists during Japan’s 1910–1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, to “Korean red pine.”
During Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, it was not only Koreans who were forced to change their names to Japanese, but also the native plants here.
The Korea Forest Service (KFS) said Monday that to mark the nation’s 70th anniversary of Liberation Day, it will change the nation’s native plants that were named arbitrarily by Japanese botanists during the 1910–1945 colonial rule.
The nation’s pine tree, commonly found on the peninsula and even expressed in the lyrics of the national anthem, has been called the “Japanese red pine” in English.
Those native plants that mainly grow in Korea, but whose common designations include the name of other countries, will be subject to the review list.
Unlike plants’ scientific names that are used universally with only one name and cannot be changed once identified under the “International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi and Plants,” plants frequently have multiple names in different places around the world.
“The review process to newly name our native plants is very important.” director general Lee You-mi of the KFS said in a press release.
“Because plant names do not only indicate what they are called but also symbolize the culture and history of the people.”
Among the nation’s 4,173 native plants, The KFS has newly named some 2,500 plants so far.
For example, Japanese red pine was changed to “Korean red pine.”
The cherry tree, which has been called a “Japanese flowering cherry” was also changed into “oriental flowering cherry.”
Some native plants, including first mug wart and shepherd’s purse, have gotten names as they sound in Korean ― “Ssuck” and “Naeng-i,” respectively.
The KFS released the list of newly named native plants on its webpage, www.kna.go.kr, and published it at the Google Play Library as well.
History Professor Kang Pan-kwon of Keimyung University welcomes the KFS’s efforts.
“Plants have always been with our lives since they are a fundamental food source for human beings,” said Kang.
“To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the nation’s independence, naming them with our own language is thus an important step to teach correct history to our future generations.”
• The Korean war of 1950–53 was devastating for the environment at both ends of the peninsula. Picture: Alamy
