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KOFU -- People in Japan have increasingly taken to cultivating mushrooms at home, apparently because of stay-at-home demand due to the coronavirus pandemic and a parallel healthy food trend, and triggering a boom in cutting down hardwoods for logs to farm the tasty fungi.

By thinning out conifer and hardwood forests planted in the mountains, there is some hope the boom will lead to a restoration of woodlands near populated areas that are entwined with local residents' everyday lives.

On Jan. 18, 2021, in one such woodland in Uenohara, Yamanashi Prefecture, members of the city's forestry study group consisting of retirees and others were cutting down broadleaf trees including jolcham and sawtooth oak trees. Trunks and branches measuring 20 centimeters or less in diameters are used for mushroom cultivation. Anything larger, they sell to the city's Kitatsuru forestry cooperative to be used as firewood. The group planned to thin out about 500 square meters of land between December and February, a good season for logging.

According to the cooperative, felling the hardwoods was prompted by the increasing demand for mushroom logs. Mushrooms grow when lumber remnants -- measuring up to 1 cm in diameter and 3-cm long and infused with shiitake, nameko, maitake and other types of mushroom spore -- are drilled into logs and left for about a year in the shade. Spores are sold at home improvement stores and elsewhere, and customers are apparently farming mushrooms in their yards or on their balconies.

Fujishukin Co., based in the prefectural city of Minami-Alps, sells mushroom spores to farmers and home improvement centers. The company says spore sales had seen slight increases in recent years, but jumped 20% this fiscal year compared to fiscal 2019.

The firm's research and development section attributes the spike to the fungi gaining attention as an immune system-booster amid a general healthy and organic food trend, and to people staying at home due to the pandemic.

Meanwhile, since the 1950s, when oil and gas became the main source of energy, demand for charcoal and firewood has plummeted, and trees in mixed forests have become thicker, resulting in many woodlands becoming covered with bushes and trees. Trees that have grown too big cannot support their weight, posing a landslide risk during heavy rains. This has prompted some to point to the need to thinning out these areas.

The 85-year-old owner of the land being logged in Uenohara said, "If it had remained covered in bushes, the trees would have eventually withered, and I was worried about them causing landslides. The sun shines well on the mountain now."

(Japanese original by Satoru Yamamoto, Kofu Bureau)

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