Dirt and All: A Satoyama Story
Embracing rural Japan with hands, teeth and tongue
On a college tour, I read a short story in some promo book of student work. It was titled “Dirt Don’t Hurt” and followed a brief coming-of-age episode for a city girl at a roadside stand.
She is grumpy, then magically rediscovers her joie de vivre by eating soil-caked produce. It’s given to her by the crusty roadside stand guy hawking his farm stuff.
Accurate or not, this is how I remember the story going.
Growing up with a sensitive stomach and allergies that kept me far from the soil, I evangelized the dirty farmer for enlightening this city-slicker girl. In our good Southern household, even barefooted Jesus with his long hair sounded fairly agri-bumpkin-like. Giving out fruit and fish and whatnot, as he did.
In my case, interacting with produce as innocuously as carving a pumpkin at Halloween gave me rashes up to the neck. Any hint of contamination might lead to hours in the bathroom. I couldn’t join orchard-picking activities with fellow Girl Scouts.
But I didn’t know anything different, so I didn’t really mind. Living off the earth was a faraway, fantasy concept that I got closest to in China’s wet markets.
Fast forward nearly a decade, and I am on my first adventure into Ishikawa prefecture’s satoyama. We trek through the surroundings of Kurakake Yama and the nearly abandoned Takigahara town, both concealed behind comparatively famous Natadera Temple.
While I lived in Ishikawa, I became acquainted with writer and inaka-lifer Hannah Kirschner, whose book, Water, Wood, and Wild Things does better than I can at succinctly explaining satoyama. The “satoyama” (village-mountain) wooded areas supported foodways and lifestyles in mountainous, temperamental Japan. In exchange, the land received noninvasive husbandry from village folk.
The impetus for today's adventure was gathering indigenous sansai (mountain vegetables) in the mist (and midst) of early April’s unfolding spring.
Our foraging guides were a kindly, tiny old Japanese man, whose name I have learned 100 times but will never remember, and a lithe Danish girl, A, who should have been a model in Tokyo but is probably too quirky.
Truthfully, I only have nice things to say about A’s quirks. If not for her, my life in Japan would be vastly different.
As for the old man, he gave detailed lectures on discerning and using the native plants we stumbled upon — all in Japanese I half understood.
Our group clustered around each specimen, ducking and bobbing to get a better look as the kids collected pine needles and weedy flowers. We all picked at this and that, with little confidence in our ability to deem what was delicious or dangerous.
Meanwhile, on her long legs, A would trot several hundred meters in an unrelated direction and come back mid-lecture, eyes gleaming and always with some utterly plain-looking plant in hand.
She would then explain exactly how to use whatever she’s found for cooking, or describe its taste and texture.
That, or smile widely to admit she had no idea what it was, but it was probably edible, so let’s give it a go and try some anyway.
While more or less perfect, A's English is syrupy. Her words slosh and slide like a boy enjoying galoshes in the rain before Mother calls him inside for something warming. A’s way of describing the world has this parental hand-holding. It’s beautiful like art, like her plants; fluid and natural but far from a TED talk.
I often wonder if companions feel the same about A’s natural sounding (to me) Japanese.
As we trudged on, we encountered yomogi everywhere, and I filled my pockets with the pungent leaves. Yomogi, I came to feel, is a much prettier word than mugwort for the same medicinal herb.
Fuki no tou, bitter buds to tempura or blend with miso,
small heart-shaped leaves for salad or others curled up in tubes,
nira and suisen which were too hard to distinguish and thus avoided,
and tall red and green stalks of refreshingly sour juice spread out across our canal-lined route. We filled our bags with whatever was pointed out to us, still a little dirty, sometimes with an ant or spider hitching a ride.
As is clear, the names (given in Japanese), I have mostly forgotten. But the plants I could still identify, given a chance.
At some point, we reached a stopping place with some auspicious stone or little shrine and a big, mostly rotten tree.
A called over to us from the tree’s base.
She had found a shiitake mushroom growing wild among the decaying wood litter. It was sizeable, recognizably shiitake-esque even to the untrained eye.
“We better not take it; I think it’s rotten,” A lamented briefly. For her, it was cool, but no more than a disappointing chance at getting another snack off the ground, something she did every day.
I would learn later that her cooking had a unique “I got this off a tree earlier!” flavor that was well-known.
To me, rotten or not, it was a living, breathing, known example of food in the satoyama. On the ground! Just growing there! Suddenly, we weren’t gathering weeds for mudpies or emergency vitamins for lost trail-goers. We had found a whole mushroom! Just out there! On its own!
I was delighted and snapped a few quick photos as we walked on.
I had experienced my first actual foraging — food I knew and could pick out that didn’t need to be cultivated or bought. In my pockets was a collection of plant life plucked from the dirt we were walking on.
I nibbled a stalk of the sour red plant.
I was snacking on nature’s sour patch kids.
Delicious.
Toward the end of our hike, A pulled me over and showed me something cupped protectively in her hands. Its spindles had the brownish-gold luster of light filtering through shoji.
This was a silkworm cocoon. A real one. She tore off a chunk of the tightly packed threads and rubbed it between pinched fingers before handing it to me.
A comment was made about the shine.
I don’t remember what she said, but I remember her gleaming smile.
I remember feeling blessed by this biblical-blonde angel for sharing the real golden treasure of these mountains, something no one eating gold-flake ice-cream in Kanazawa could care less about. I felt like I had been visited by some image of Kannan. It was as if I was being invited to join the satoyama’s womanly congregation of lunch-proffering obaachama, robust little boar hunters and sake-slinging obasan .
Ever the romantic, there was no way I could overlook the metaphorical weight of that moment. That shred of cocoon has since become one of my most treasured possessions.
The satoyama provides. Like a mother, like a household.
Villagers found food, kinship, and fresh water in its fertile, verdant wood: anything one could need. From this, they built communities and created enduring legacies that we still celebrate around the wold through poems and art.
The first friends I made in Japan were thanks to the satoyama. A, of course, and her friends, a wonderful couple, their young daughter with endless requests of Pokemon drawings, plus a host of bohemians, artists, and chefs.
Not every interaction needs the thought or social acrobatics I’d been primed for coming to Japan. It could also just be a matter of exploring the way children and animals do. The world provides if you pick something up and eat it: dirt and all.
