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Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan: Notes

Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan
Notes

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Notes

table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Contents
  5. Foreword by Ann Sherif
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Note on Transliteration, Naming Convention, and English Translations
  8. Introduction: Botanical Potential
  9. Chapter 1. Botanical Families: Osaki Midori, Moss, and Evolutionary Resemblance
  10. Chapter 2. Botanical Allegory: Metamorphosis and Colonial Memory in Abe Kōbō’s “Dendrocacalia”
  11. Chapter 3. Botanical Media: Haniya Yutaka, Hashimoto Ken, Itō Seikō, and the Search for Dead Spirits
  12. Chapter 4. Botanical Regeneration: Fire and Disturbance Ecology in the Films of Yanagimachi Mitsuo and Kawase Naomi
  13. Chapter 5. Botanical Migration: Empathy and Naturalization in the Poetry and Prose of Hiromi Ito
  14. Epilogue: Botanical Models
  15. Notes
  16. Bibliography
  17. Index
  18. A volume in the series
  19. Copyright

Notes

Foreword

  1. 1. De-nin D. Lee, ed., Eco-Art History in East and Southeast Asia (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), xix.
  2. 2. Michael Dylan Foster, “Walking in the City with Natsume Sōseki: The Metaphorical Landscape in ‘Koto no sorane,’” Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 6 (Summer 2005): 138–139. I am indebted to the work of Haruo Shirane, Sonya Arntzen, Yuki Masami, and Mina Kaneko.

Introduction

  1. 1. I use the term “botanical imagination” in reference to the work of John Charles Ryan, whose notion of a “dialectical interchange of the imaginative potentialities of plants and non-plants” was an inspiration for this book. See John Charles Ryan, Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2018), 11.
  2. 2. In theorizing botanical poetics, I am indebted to the work of Joela Jacobs, whose notion of phytopoetics names “both a poetic engagement with plants in literature and moments in which plants take on literary or cultural agency themselves.” The botanical poetics I map out in this book resemble the phytopoetics of which Jacobs writes in her work; in particular, the poetics of Hiromi Ito, whom I discuss in chapter 5. The phytopoetic qualities of vegetal eroticism and violence are clearly legible in Ito’s poetry. See Joela Jacobs, “Phytopoetics: Upending the Passive Paradigm with Vegetal Violence and Eroticism,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 2 (2019): 1–18.
  3. 3. See https://www.doaks.org/research/mellon-initiatives/plant-humanities-initiative and https://plants.arizona.edu/bibliography/.
  4. 4. Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 1. Italics in the original.
  5. 5. Nealon, Plant Theory, x.
  6. 6. Not all theorists working within CPS discuss Foucauldian biopower in the manner Nealon does, but they are all, to some extent, concerned with the abjection of plant life within dominant regimes of knowledge. Michael Marder—arguably the leading voice in CPS and editor of Brill’s CPS book series—has painstakingly worked to reintroduce the centrality of plant life in the classical canon of Western philosophy. Robin Wall Kimmerer—another leading voice of CPS and a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient who has inspired theorists and general readers alike to think deeply and differently about plants—has argued for the necessity of integrating forms of Indigenous sciences that do not denigrate plant life into the dominant sciences that have heretofore objectified plants as mere specimens. Stefano Mancuso and Monica Gagliano have in turn used unconventional methods within dominant scientific protocols to advocate for plant life’s ability to communicate and experience the world in ways most humans have not anticipated. Both have written about their groundbreaking experiments in public-facing books that engage the humanities as much as they do the physical sciences, providing good examples of how CPS theorists strive for interdisciplinary engagement. The list of CPS thinkers goes on, from philosopher Emanuele Coccia and his focus on the metamorphic capabilities of plant life to usher in a new botanical metaphysics, to Beronda Montgomery, whose 2021 book Lessons from Plants posits we have much to learn from plants about care work and creating supportive communities in academia and beyond.
  7. 7. BBC Earth’s The Green Planet (2022) and Netflix’s Fantastic Fungi (2019) are two such examples.
  8. 8. Gabriel Popkin, “‘Wood Wide Web’—The Underground Network of Microbes That Connects Trees—Mapped for First Time,” Science, May 15, 2019, https://www.science.org/content/article/wood-wide-web-underground-network-microbes-connects-trees-mapped-first-time.
  9. 9. This term was proposed by Kathryn M. Parsley as a corrective to the more common term plant blindness, which Parsley argues is problematic due to its ableist use of a disability metaphor to signify a negative trait. See Kathryn M. Parsley, “Plant Awareness Disparity: A Case for Renaming Plant Blindness,” Plants People Planet, October 3, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10153.
  10. 10. Andrea Thompson, “Plants Are the World’s Dominant Life-Form,” Scientific American, August 1, 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/plants-are-the-worlds-dominant-life-form/.
  11. 11. Fujihara Tatsushi, Shokubutsukō (Tokyo: Ikinobiru Books, 2022), 15.
  12. 12. Kliment Timiryazev, The Life of the Plant, trans. A. Sheremetyeva (Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1958), 347.
  13. 13. Japanese environmental history is another story, however. Books such as David Fedman’s Seeds of Control and Tom Haven’s Lands of Plants in Motion demonstrate the willingness of historians to move plants to the foreground of historical narratives.
  14. 14. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney has, for example, tied the cherry blossom to Japanese imperialism in her examination of the militarization of Japanese aesthetics. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3. Historians like Fujihara Tatsushi and Jung Lee have examined the role agriculture and botany have played in Japan’s interwar colonial project, while David Fedman and Tessa Morris-Suzuki have demonstrated the impact of forestry on modes of control (both environmental and social) in Japan’s colonial acquisitions. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “The Nature of Empire: Forest Ecology, Colonialism and Survival Politics in Japan’s Imperial Order,” Japan Studies 33, no. 3 (2013): 225–242. See also David Fedman, Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020).
  15. 15. Fujihara, Shokubutsukō, 21.
  16. 16. Michael Marder, Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 10.
  17. 17. Robert Stolz’s Bad Water (2014) and Brett Walker’s Toxic Archipelago (2010) are good examples of this paradigm in the field of environmental history, while Karen Thornber’s Ecoambiguity (2012) and Christine Marran’s Ecology Without Culture (2017) are good examples from within the field of literary and film studies.
  18. 18. Kimura Saeko’s 2013 book A Theory of Post-3.11 Literature: Toward a New Japanese Literature (Shinsaigo bungakuron: Atarashii Nihon bungaku no tame ni) and its 2018 follow-up A Theory of Post-3.11 Literature after That (Sono go no shinsaigo bungakuron) are key texts in a growing corpus of post-3.11 scholarship that also includes Rachel DiNitto’s Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster and Koichi Haga’s The Earth Writes: The Great Earthquake and the Novel in Post-3/11 Japan, both published in 2019.
  19. 19. Yuki Masami, “On Harmony with Nature: Toward Japanese Ecocriticism,” in Ecocriticism in Japan, ed. Hisaaki Wake, Yuki Masami, and Keijiro Suga (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 4.
  20. 20. Yuki, “On Harmony with Nature,” 4.
  21. 21. Haruo Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 8.
  22. 22. Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, 1–4.
  23. 23. Yuki offers the following critique of Shirane’s Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: “Ideological criticism rarely surfaces in Shirane’s literary and historical examination of the cultural representation of the environment.” Yuki, “Ecocriticism in Japan,” 4. It is my contention that CPS is particularly good at fleshing out ideological critique/criticism in relation to conceptions of “nature.”
  24. 24. Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, 4.
  25. 25. Gregory Bateson, Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Cornelia and Michael Bessie Books, 1991), 240.
  26. 26. Bateson, Sacred Unity, 241.
  27. 27. I recognize that Bateson’s gendered use of men here to mean “human” in general is problematic. It is likely that Bateson uses men to keep symmetry with the classical syllogism he is amending. I, in turn, keep Bateson’s phrasing throughout, with an implied “[sic]” attached to each usage of men.
  28. 28. Hara Shōji, Hito wa kusa de aru: “ruji” to “zure” o meguru kōsatsu (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2013), 236.
  29. 29. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 13–14.
  30. 30. Bateson, Sacred Unity, 241.
  31. 31. Here I break the convention the rest of the book follows—which is to list names in Japanese order, with the family name first and given name second—and refer to Itō Hiromi as Hiromi Ito, with the given name first and without the elongated ō in her family name. This is the writer’s preference when being discussed in English, and it helps me differentiate between her and writer Itō Seikō, whom I discuss in chapter 3.
  32. 32. Itō Hiromi and Machida Kō. Futatasu no hamon (Tokyo: Bungei Seishun, 2022), 79–80.
  33. 33. Itō and Machida, Futatsu no hamon, 80.
  34. 34. Laurel Rasplica Rodd and Mary Catherine Henkenius, trans., Kokinshū: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern (Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 1996), 35.
  35. 35. Matsuo Bashō, Bashō’s Journey: The Literary Prose of Matsuo Bashō, trans. David Landis Barnhill (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 62.
  36. 36. Hiromi Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, trans. Jon L. Pitt (New York: Nightboat Books, 2023), 57.
  37. 37. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 342.
  38. 38. Sumana Roy, How I Became a Tree (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 54.
  39. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3.
  40. 40. In their as-yet-unpublished history of The Secret Life of Plants (a portion of which was presented at the 2024 Plant Animacies Workshop at Harvey Mudd College), Vivien Hamilton and Delia Garvus demonstrate the extent to which Tompkins and Bird were taken seriously upon their book’s release and thus argue that the line between so-called legitimate science and pseudoscience is not as clear cut as we might wish to believe. I use the term pseudoscience throughout this book in reference to both The Secret Life of Plants and the work of Hashimoto Ken, but I simultaneously recognize the ideological bias this word implies. Insofar as this book is about varying ways of knowing plants, and how those ways become entangled within one another, I acknowledge that The Secret Life of Plants and the work of Hashimoto Ken were each taken as serious science by some and rejected as pseudoscience by others. This places these texts in the generative in-between space that this present book looks to identify.
  41. 41. I am indebted to Gregory Golley’s 2008 monograph When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism, which was foundational in my thinking about the connections between Japanese literature and science.
  42. 42. Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Malden: Polity, 2012), 3.
  43. 43. Beronda Montgomery, Lessons from Plants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 5.
  44. 44. “What Is Plant Plasticity?” VILLUM Research Center for Plant Plasticity, accessed January 23, 2024, https://plantplasticity.ku.dk/what_is_sb/#:~:text=Plant%20plasticity%20refers%20to%20a,with%20changes%20in%20its%20environment.
  45. 45. Malabou writes of the subject undergoing the radical changes of destructive plasticity: “We return nowhere. Between life and death we become other to ourselves.” Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, 34.
  46. 46. David W. Bates, “Unity, Plasticity, Catastrophe: Order and Pathology in the Cybernetic Era,” in Catastrophes: A History and Theory of an Operative Concept, ed. Nitzan Lebovic and Andreas Killen (Boston: de Gruyter, 2014), 54.
  47. 47. Christopher Dole, Robert Hayashi, Andrew Poe, Austin Sarat, and Boris Wolfson, “When Is Catastrophe? An Introduction,” in The Time of Catastrophe: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Age of Catastrophe, ed. Christopher Dole, Robert Hayashi, Andrew Poe, Austin Sarat, and Boris Wolfson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 1.
  48. 48. Michael Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant,” New Yorker, December 15, 2013.
  49. 49. Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant.”
  50. 50. Dawn Keetley, “Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?” in Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, ed. Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1.
  51. 51. Catherine Malabou distinguishes between the “ungovernable” and the “nongovernable,” claiming the latter names something that is “not resisting the logic of government, but perfectly alien to it.” See https://youtu.be/RoxM_7QVMnc. In a lecture given on May 12, 2023, at the University of California, Irvine, Malabou suggested plants may indeed fall under this category.

1. Botanical Families

  1. 1. I follow the custom of referring to Osaki by this name rather than “Ozaki” (which is the more common reading of the characters that make up her family name), as this is the pronunciation used in her native Tottori Prefecture. Max Fleischer, who created the film Evolution, is the animator famous for adapting comic strips such as Superman, Betty Boop, and Popeye for the screen. He was not the famous bryologist of the same name who specialized in categorizing the mosses of Java. It is fitting, however, that the two share a name, as moss ties them together in a kind of doppelganger scenario that would certainly have appealed to Osaki. For an outline of screening dates at the Musashinokan theater that correlate with the films discussed in Osaki’s Jottings on Film, see: Hideyama Yōko, Osaki Midori e no tabi: hon to zasshi no meiro no naka de (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2009), 62–63.
  2. 2. Osaki Midori, Osaki Midori Zenshū (Tokyo: Sōjusha, 1979), 345–346.
  3. 3. Michael Weiner, “The Invention of Identity: Race and Nation in Pre-War Japan,” in The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Frank Dikotter (London: Hurst, 1997), 102–110.
  4. 4. Sherrie Cross, “Prestige and Comfort: The Development of Social Darwinism in Early Meiji Japan, and the Role of Edward Sylvester Morse,” Annals of Science 53, no. 4 (1996): 323–344. See also Mizuguchi Hajime, “Nihon ni okeru Darwin no juyō to eikyō,” Gakushutsu no dōkō 3 (2010): 48–57.
  5. 5. Cross, “Prestige and Comfort,” 336.
  6. 6. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003), 14–15.
  7. 7. Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 15.
  8. 8. The Machiko Cycle includes the following stories, all of which feature an intricate web of characters centered around Ono Machiko and seem to inhabit the same narrative universe: Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense; “Walking” (“Hokō,” 1931); “Miss Cricket” (“Kōrogijō,” 1932); and “A Night in Anton’s Basement” (“Chikashitsu anton no hitoya,” 1932).
  9. 9. Seiji Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 208.
  10. 10. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism, 208.
  11. 11. See, for example, Nathan Clerici, “Performance and Nonsense: Osaki Midori’s ‘Strange Love,’” Japanese Language and Literature 51, no. 2 (2017) and Tomoko Aoyama, “Sweet Bean Paste and Excrement: Food, Humor, and Gender in Osaki Midori’s Writings,” Gastro-Modernism: Food, Literature, Culture, ed. Derek Gladwin (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2019).
  12. 12. Mure Yōko, Osaki Midori (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1998), 95.
  13. 13. Kawasaki Kenko, Osaki Midori: Sakyū no anata e (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2010), 85.
  14. 14. Hideyama, Osaki Midori e no tabi, 75.
  15. 15. Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 38.
  16. 16. J. W. Bates, “Is ‘Life-Form’ a Useful Concept in Bryophyte Ecology?” Oikos 82 (1998): 224.
  17. 17. Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 11.
  18. 18. Karen L. F. Houle, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics as Extension or Becoming? The Case of Becoming-Plant,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9, nos. 1/2 (2011): 96.
  19. 19. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 115.
  20. 20. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 372.
  21. 21. Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), Project Gutenberg EBook, 97. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm.
  22. 22. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 371. For “doppelgänger,” Osaki uses the word bunshin, with the characters for “divide” and “heart/mind,” respectively, glossed with phonetic katakana characters reading dopperugengeru. The phrase I have rendered “split poet” is bunretsu shijin.
  23. 23. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 367. It is somewhat difficult to capture the reversal in English. The parallelism is clearer in the Japanese.
  24. 24. As explained in chapter 3, Haniya Yutaka also writes of becoming botanical as both an expansion and a contraction in his novel Dead Spirits.
  25. 25. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 278.
  26. 26. Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 10–11.
  27. 27. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 386.
  28. 28. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 14. To capture the repetition of this paragraph, I have attempted in my translation to use the words mandarin orange for every time Osaki uses them. While it sounds repetitious in English, the effect is even more noticeable in the Japanese.
  29. 29. Catherine Malabou, “Post-Trauma: Towards a New Definition?” in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1, ed. Tom Cohen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Open Humanities Press, 2012), 235.
  30. 30. Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 158. Italics in the original.
  31. 31. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 17.
  32. 32. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 34. In his essay on moss in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, Arakawa Tomotsugu attempts to determine just what kind of moss Osaki is writing about in the novella. Based on Machiko’s quote here, he determines they are likely tamagoke (Bartramia pomiformis). Arakawa Tomotsugu, “Kokegakusha ga yomitoku ‘Dainana kankai hōkō,’” in Osaki Midori o yomu: Kōenhen II (Tottori: Osaki Midori fōramu jikkōiinkai, 2016), 80.
  33. 33. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 33.
  34. 34. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 25.
  35. 35. Osaki Midori and Nozoe Nobuhisa, Dainana kankai hōkō (Tokyo: Ohta Shuppan, 2018), 130–131.
  36. 36. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 43–44.
  37. 37. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 44.
  38. 38. Elizabeth Grosz, “Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance,” Australian Feminist Studies, 14, no. 29 (1999): 41. DOI: 10.1080/08164649993317.
  39. 39. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 49.
  40. 40. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 53.
  41. 41. Akiyama Hiroyuki, Koke no hanashi (Tokyo: Chukokoron: Shinsha, 2004), 32.
  42. 42. Stella Sandford, Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 103.
  43. 43. Sandford, Vegetal Sex, 37.
  44. 44. Sandford, Vegetal Sex, 38.
  45. 45. Sandford, Vegetal Sex, 105.
  46. 46. Sandford, Vegetal Sex, 117.
  47. 47. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 49.
  48. 48. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 74.
  49. 49. Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 20.
  50. 50. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 74.
  51. 51. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Debating Racial Science in Wartime Japan,” Osiris 13 (1998): 354–375.
  52. 52. Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
  53. 53. See Livia Monnet, “Montage, Cinematic Subjectivity and Feminism in Ozaki Midori’s Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense,” Japan Forum 11, no. 1 (1999): 57–82.
  54. 54. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, 116.
  55. 55. Kawasaki, Osaki Midori, 88.
  56. 56. Kawasaki, Osaki Midori, 85–89.
  57. 57. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “The Nature of Empire: Forest Ecology, Colonialism and Survival Politics in Japan’s Imperial Order,” Japan Studies 33, no. 3 (2013): 235.
  58. 58. Morris-Suzuki, “The Nature of Empire,” 234.
  59. 59. Fujihara Tatsushi, Sensō to nogyō (Tokyo: Shūeisha International e-shinsho, 2017), Kindle edition.
  60. 60. See Vanessa Catherine Baker’s 2022 dissertation “Entangled Ecologies of the Everyday: Gender, Labor, and Nature in Rural Proletarian Literature of Korea and Japan,” University of California, Irvine.
  61. 61. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 31.
  62. 62. Kawasaki, Osaki Midori, 90.
  63. 63. Kawasaki, Osaki Midori, 90.
  64. 64. Arakawa, “Kokegakusha ga yomitoku ‘Dainana kankai hōkō.’” 85.
  65. 65. Oka Asajirō, Seibutsugaku kōwa (Tokyo: Kaiseikan, 1916), 443.
  66. 66. Oka Asajirō, Seibutsugaku kōwa, 447.
  67. 67. Gregory Sullivan, Regenerating Japan: Organicism, Modernism and National Destiny in Oka Asajirō’s “Evolution and Human Life” (Budapest: CEU Press, 2018), 12.
  68. 68. Sullivan, Regenerating Japan, 5.
  69. 69. Arakawa, “Kokegakusha ga yomitoku ‘Dainana kankai hōkō,’” 86.
  70. 70. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 107.
  71. 71. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 198.
  72. 72. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 199.
  73. 73. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 199.
  74. 74. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 37.
  75. 75. Alan Richardson, “Erasmus Darwin and the Fungus School,” Wordsworth Circle 33, no. 3 (2001): 113.
  76. 76. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden Part II (Dublin: J. Moore, 1796), 1.
  77. 77. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 75.
  78. 78. Irigaray and Marder, Through Vegetal Being, 50.
  79. 79. Throughout Jottings on Film, Osaki expresses a deep nostalgia for silent film.
  80. 80. For example, author Mure Yōko writes of Osaki, “I was astonished such a writer as this had lived in Japan.” Mure, Osaki Midori, 7.
  81. 81. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 530.
  82. 82. Osaki, Osaki Midori Zenshū, 159.
  83. 83. Arakawa, “Kokegakusha ga yomitoku ‘Dainana kankai hōkō.’” 12.
  84. 84. Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 37.

2. Botanical Allegory

  1. 1. Margaret S. Key, Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe Kōbō’s Realist Project (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2001), 10.
  2. 2. Abe Kōbō, Abe Kōbō zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2009), 30:13.
  3. 3. Hanada Kiyoteru, “Dōbutsu—shokubutsu—kōbutsu,” in Gendai Nihon bungaku taikei 77: Dazai Osamu—Sakaguchi Ango shū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1969), 425.
  4. 4. Osaki Midori, Osaki Midori Zenshū (Tokyo: Sōjusha, 1979), 524–525.
  5. 5. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
  6. 6. Sebastian Conrad, “Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan, 1945–2001,” Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 1 (2003): 85–99.
  7. 7. In his discussion of plants within the Foucauldian concept of biopower, Jeffrey T. Nealon outlines a systemic shift in the nineteenth century that Foucault recognized as a change from the study of natural science to that of biology. This shift entailed “a mutation of the dominant epistemic procedures—from a representational discourse that maps external similitude and resemblance, to the emergence of a speculative discourse that takes as its object hidden internal processes.” Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 7.
  8. 8. Mutsuko Motoyama, “The Literature and Politics of Abe Kōbō: Farewell to Communism in Suna no Onna,” Monumenta Nipponica 50, no. 3 (1995): 309.
  9. 9. Mutsuko Motoyama recounts that Abe had been living in a boardinghouse next to factory workers’ quarters at the time he was awarded the Akutagawa Prize in 1951. See Motoyama, “The Literature and Politics of Abe Kōbō,” 314.
  10. 10. Tsuyama Takashi, “Plantæ Boninenses Novæ vel Criticæ. V,” Shokubutsugaku zasshi 1, no. 591 (1936): 129–133.
  11. 11. See “Ogasawara World Heritage Centre,” http://ogasawara-info.jp/. See also Kazuto Kawakami and Isamu Okochi, eds., Restoring the Oceanic Island Ecosystem Impact and Management of Invasive Alien Species in the Bonin Islands (New York: Springer, 2010).
  12. 12. Itō Motomi, “Wadannoki—Taiyōtō de ki ni natta kiku,” Gekkan hyakka 401 (1996), 24.
  13. 13. David Chapman, The Bonin Islanders, 1830 to the Present: Narrating Japanese Nationality (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 37.
  14. 14. Chapman, The Bonin Islanders, 92.
  15. 15. Chapman, The Bonin Islanders, 105.
  16. 16. Chapman, The Bonin Islanders, 104.
  17. 17. Chapman, The Bonin Islanders, 140.
  18. 18. Chapman, The Bonin Islanders, 159.
  19. 19. Christy Wampole, Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5.
  20. 20. My discussion of “Dendrocacalia” is drawn primarily from the 1952 version of the short story. Although the general outline of the plot remains the same between the 1949 and 1952 versions, the 1949 version is longer and features an opening section of direct address to the reader that is excised in the revised version of 1952. The identity of the narrating voice is less stable in the earlier version, and there is a greater sense of ambiguity over the roles certain characters play in the narrative. For a thorough explanation of the differences between the two versions, see Toba Kōji, Undōtai—Abe Kōbō (Tokyo: Ichiyōsha, 2007).
  21. 21. Abe Kōbō, Abe Kōbō zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997), 3:350.
  22. 22. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:351.
  23. 23. My reading of the motif of interior/exterior in “Dendrocacalia” is informed by Toba Kōji’s chapter “‘Henbō’ to riarizumu ronsō—‘Dendorokakariya’ 1949,” in Toba, Undōtai—Abe Kōbō.
  24. 24. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:356.
  25. 25. Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari (Medford, OR: Polity, 2019), 5.
  26. 26. Toba, Undōtai, 84.
  27. 27. Motoyama, “The Literature and Politics of Abe Kōbō,” 320.
  28. 28. Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 297–298.
  29. 29. Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (London: J. Turner, 1897), Nineteenth Century Collections Online, 4.
  30. 30. Kropotkin, Anarchism, 4.
  31. 31. Konishi, Anarchist Modernity, 238. Anarchist Ōsugi Sakae (who founded Japan’s first Esperanto school) translated Mutual Aid into Japanese in 1917, having previously translated Darwin’s Origin of the Species three years before in 1914. Ōsugi would go on to translate Jean-Henri Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques in 1922. See Konishi, Anarchist Modernity, 318.
  32. 32. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: William Heinemann, 1915), 62. Quotation marks and italics in the original.
  33. 33. Meguro Jiro, “Soveto seibutsugaku no tenbō,” Kagaku to gijutsu 11 (1948): 13–14.
  34. 34. The essays that compose Mutual Aid were originally published during the 1890s in the British literary magazine The Nineteenth Century.
  35. 35. Peter Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism (London: Freedom, 1912), 46. Italics in the original.
  36. 36. Kliment Timiryazev, The Life of the Plant, trans. A. Sheremetyeva (Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1958), 347.
  37. 37. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:192.
  38. 38. Kropotkin, Anarchism, 4.
  39. 39. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:352.
  40. 40. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:352.
  41. 41. Stefano Mancuso, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior (New York: Atria Books, 2017), 49.
  42. 42. “Kokudo ryokka suishin undo,” Sanrin—Journal of Forestry 791 (1950): 1.
  43. 43. In Japanese, “Areta kokudo o heiwa na midori de.” See “Kokudo ryokka kanren no kitte ni shōkai,” Kokudo ryokka suishin kikō, http://www.green.or.jp/news/news-other/o_fukyu_entry_273/.
  44. 44. “Kokushi rokka suishin undo,” 1.
  45. 45. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 11.
  46. 46. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:354.
  47. 47. Mancuso, Revolutionary Genius of Plants, 73.
  48. 48. Abe Kōbō, Abe Kōbō zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997), 2:234.
  49. 49. Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, trans. Joan Benham (Washington, DC: Island, 2015), 67.
  50. 50. Mancuso and Viola, Brilliant Green, 77.
  51. 51. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:352.
  52. 52. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:353.
  53. 53. Mancuso, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants, 21.
  54. 54. Kropotkin, Anarchism, 4.
  55. 55. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:355.
  56. 56. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:356.
  57. 57. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:356.
  58. 58. Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 158.
  59. 59. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:356.
  60. 60. Abe Kōbō, Abe Kōbō zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1999), 21:437.
  61. 61. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:356.
  62. 62. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:356.
  63. 63. Irigaray and Marder, Through Vegetal Being, 120.
  64. 64. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:357.
  65. 65. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3: 362.
  66. 66. Timiryazev, The Life of the Plant, 70.
  67. 67. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:359.
  68. 68. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:362.
  69. 69. Nakajima Seinosuke, “Shokubutsu no seikatsu,” Yuibutsuron kenkyū 20 (1934): 121.
  70. 70. Nakajima, “Shokubutsu no seikatsu,” 124.
  71. 71. Kliment Timiryazev, Shokubutsu no sekatsu, trans. Ishii Tomoyuki (Tokyo: Iwasaki shoten, 1947), 1.
  72. 72. Timiryazev, The Life of the Plant, 340.
  73. 73. Timiryazev, The Life of the Plant, 337.
  74. 74. Timiryazev, The Life of the Plant, 347.
  75. 75. With Honda’s help, the Shōwa emperor published a series of studies on the plants of Nasu and the Izu Peninsula between 1962 and 1985. See Kageyama Noboru, “Shōwa Tenno no jiko jitsugen to seibutsugaku kenkyū—sasaeta chiteki tankyūshin to ōsei na kiryoku,” Shizen kagaku no tobira 5, no. 4 (1999): 26–27.
  76. 76. Terao Shin and Honda Masaji, Shin Nihon shōnen shōjo bunko dai 7 hen: Dōbutsu to shokubutsu no seikatsu (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1940), 2.
  77. 77. Terao and Honda, Shin Nihon shōnen shōjo bunko dai 7 hen, 2.
  78. 78. Abe, Abe Kōbō zenshū, 3:363.
  79. 79. Terao and Honda, Shin Nihon shōnen shōjo bunko dai 7 hen, 186.
  80. 80. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “The Nature of Empire: Forest Ecology, Colonialism and Survival Politics in Japan’s Imperial Order,” Japan Studies 33, no. 3 (2013): 230.
  81. 81. Forestry of Japan (Tokyo: Bureau of Forestry, Department of Agriculture and Commerce, 1910), 1.
  82. 82. Terao and Honda, Shin Nihon shōnen shōjo bunko dai 7 hen, 182.
  83. 83. Tsuyama, “Plantæ Boninenses Novæ vel Criticæ. V,” 129.
  84. 84. Jung Lee, “Between Universalism and Regionalism: Universal Systematics from Imperial Japan,” British Society for the History of Science 48, no. 4 (2015): 663.
  85. 85. Lee, “Between Universalism and Regionalism,” 676. Thomas Havens claims Nakai made eighteen trips to Korea between 1908 and 1940. See Thomas R. H. Havens, Land of Plants in Motion: Japanese Botany and the World (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020), 117.
  86. 86. Havens, Land of Plants in Motion, 118.
  87. 87. Lee, “Between Universalism and Regionalism,” 665.
  88. 88. Lee, “Between Universalism and Regionalism,” 667.

3. Botanical Media

  1. 1. Haniya Yutaka and Tachibana Takashi, Mugen no sō no moto ni (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1997), 111–112.
  2. 2. Thomas R. H. Havens, Parkscapes: Green Spaces in Modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011), 95.
  3. 3. “Panel Documents: November 24, 1944, Musashino Air Raids and Nakajima Aircraft Co.” Committee for the Promotion of Peace under the Declaration of Musashino as a Nuclear-Free City, accessed March 3, 2023, https://www.city.musashimurayama.lg.jp/.
  4. 4. Hattori Kenshō, “Kichijōji de no kūshū taiken,” Musashino no kūshū to sono kioku, accessed March 3, 2023, https://www.city.musashimurayama.lg.jp/.
  5. 5. Shirakawa Masayoshi, ed., Haniya Yutaka dokuji “Shirei” no sekai (Tokyo: NHK Shuppan, 1997), 12.
  6. 6. Haniya Yutaka, Shirei I (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1981), 28.
  7. 7. Haniya and Tachibana, Mugen no sō no moto ni, 26. The term Haniya uses, bunretsukei, contains the same word (bunretsu) that Osaki Midori uses throughout Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense to discuss “split psychology.”
  8. 8. Haniya and Tachibana, Mugen no sō no moto ni, 26.
  9. 9. Haniya Yutaka dokuji “Shirei” no sekai, 61.
  10. 10. For a 1946 account of the different factions associated with the agrarian movement, see Seiyei Wakukawa, “Japanese Tenant Movements,” Far Eastern Survey 15, no. 3 (1946): 40–44.
  11. 11. Nihon anakizumu undō jinmei jiten (Tokyo: Parushuppan, 2004), 516.
  12. 12. Yoshiki Taijiri, “Beckett and Haniya Yutaka: Two Versions of the Ontological Enquiry,” Journal of Irish Studies 17 (2002): 109.
  13. 13. Haniya and Tachibana, Mugen no sō no moto ni, 195.
  14. 14. Almost twenty years passed between the publications of the initial run of four volumes and the fifth volume, which was published in 1975 in the magazine Gunzō. The remaining volumes, all published in Gunzō, saw several years between publications: volume 6 in 1981, volume 7 in 1984, volume 8 in 1986, and volume 7 in 1995.
  15. 15. Haniya Yutaka dokuji “Shirei” no sekai, 13.
  16. 16. Haniya Yutaka dokuji “Shirei” no sekai, 13. Ellipses in the original.
  17. 17. Shinsuke Tsurumi, An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan 1931–1945 (London: KPI, 1986), 65.
  18. 18. Haniya Yutaka dokuji “Shirei” no sekai, 64.
  19. 19. Haniya, Shirei I, 11.
  20. 20. James Dorsey, “The Art of War: Sakaguchi Ango’s ‘Pearls’ and the Nature of Literary Resistance,” in Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and War, ed. James Dorsey and Doug Slaymaker (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 98.
  21. 21. Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 174.
  22. 22. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 24.
  23. 23. Haniya, Shirei I, 30.
  24. 24. Haniya, Shirei I, 108–109.
  25. 25. Haniya, Shirei I, 24.
  26. 26. Haniya, Shirei I, 15.
  27. 27. Haniya, Shirei I, 16.
  28. 28. Haniya, Shirei I, 16.
  29. 29. Takizawa Kenji, Ki to ke to ki: hirogari to gyōshuku no bigaku (Tokyo: Hozansha, 1993), 97.
  30. 30. Takizawa, Ki to ke to ki, 101.
  31. 31. See Fabio Rambelli’s chapter “The Cultural Imagination of Trees and the Environment” in Buddhist Materiality: A Cultural History of Objects in Japanese Buddhism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007) for a discussion of the entangled histories of somoku jōbutsu, Shinto ideology, and land preservation.
  32. 32. John Durhman Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 47.
  33. 33. Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 3.
  34. 34. Takemura Shinichi, Uchūju (Tokyo: Chuo Seihan, 2018), 44.
  35. 35. Takemura, Uchūju, 44.
  36. 36. Haniya, Shirei I, 110.
  37. 37. Haniya, Shirei I, 110.
  38. 38. Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 6.
  39. 39. Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, 34.
  40. 40. Fujii Takashi, “‘Jinshinsei’ no Haniya Yutaka: “Shirei” to posuto ‘ningenchūshinshūgi,’” Shōwa Bungaku Kenkyū 84 (2022).
  41. 41. Haniya, Shirei I, 107.
  42. 42. Haniya, Shirei I, 107–108.
  43. 43. Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari (Medford, OR: Polity, 2019), 37.
  44. 44. Quoted in Coccia, The Life of Plants, 87.
  45. 45. Haniya, Shirei I, 108.
  46. 46. Haniya, Shirei I, 108.
  47. 47. Haniya, Shirei I, 110.
  48. 48. Haniya, Shirei I, 48
  49. 49. Haniya, Shirei I, 48. Ellipses in the original.
  50. 50. Haniya, Shirei I, 48.
  51. 51. Coccia, The Life of Plants, 8.
  52. 52. Haniya and Tachibana, Mugen no sō no moto ni, 114–115.
  53. 53. Haniya and Tachibana, Mugen no sō no moto ni, 116.
  54. 54. Haniya and Tachibana, Mugen no sō no moto ni, 116.
  55. 55. For a summary of the impact and controversy of The Secret Life of Plants, see Michael Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant,” New Yorker, December 15, 2013. https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/the-intelligent-plant/.
  56. 56. Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, The Secret Life of Plants (New York: Harper, 2002), 152.
  57. 57. Cleve Backster, Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods, and Human Cells (Anza, CA: White Rose Millennium, 2003).
  58. 58. At various points, Dead Spirits directly references literary and philosophical works such as Lao Tzu’s Dao de jing and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poem “A Ballad of François Villion, Prince of All Ballad-Makers.”
  59. 59. Hashimoto Ken, “Aruhuakoiru wo hatsumei suru made,” Nihon Chōkagakkai, accessed January 28, 2024, http://www.alphacoil.com/kisekiap.htm.
  60. 60. Hashimoto, “Aruhuakoiru wo hatsumei suru made.”
  61. 61. Hashimoto, “Aruhuakoiru wo hatsumei suru made.”
  62. 62. Hashimoto Ken, Kagaku ka? Shūkyō ka? (Tokyo: Weagle Books, 1988).
  63. 63. Tompkins and Bird, The Secret Life of Plants, 44.
  64. 64. Hashimoto Ken, Shokubutsu ni wa kokoro ga aru (Tokyo: Goma Shobō, 1997), 147.
  65. 65. Hashimoto Ken, “Utau saboten,” Seishin kagaku 291 (1971): 42.
  66. 66. Tompkins and Bird, The Secret Life of Plants, 43.
  67. 67. Haniya, Shirei I, 108.
  68. 68. Hashimoto, “Utau saboten,” 42.
  69. 69. Hashimoto, “Utau saboten,” 42.
  70. 70. Haniya Yutaka, Shirei II (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1981), 38.
  71. 71. Haniya Yutaka dokuji “Shirei” no sekai, 128.
  72. 72. Hashimoto, “Utau saboten,” 42.
  73. 73. Hashimoto, “Utau saboten,” 42.
  74. 74. Hashimoto, Kagaku ka? Shūkyō ka?, 18.
  75. 75. Hashimoto Ken, Yojigensekai no shinpi (Tokyo: Ikeda, 1966).
  76. 76. Hashimoto, Kagaku ka? Shūkyō ka?, 17.
  77. 77. Hashimoto Ken, Shokubutsu to ohanashi suru hō (Tokyo: Goma Shobō, 1995), 133.
  78. 78. Hashimoto, Shokubutsu to ohanashi suru hō, 133.
  79. 79. Hashimoto, Shokubutsu to ohanashi suru hō, 134.
  80. 80. Hashimoto, Shokubutsu to ohanashi suru hō, 134.
  81. 81. Takemura. Uchūju, 47. Emphasis in original.
  82. 82. Directors’ Statement from Press Packet for Conversation with a Cactus (received via personal correspondence).
  83. 83. Ryūtanji Yū, Shaboten gensō (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2016), 187–207.
  84. 84. Itō Seikō, Botanikaru raifu—shokubutsu seikatsu (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1999), 98.
  85. 85. Itō, Botanikaru raifu, 100.
  86. 86. Itō, Botanikaru raifu, 100.
  87. 87. Itō Seikō, Sōzō rajio (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2013), 101–102. The majority of the ellipses are in the original.
  88. 88. Itō, Sōzō rajio, 33.
  89. 89. Catherine Malabou, “Post-Trauma: Towards a New Definition?,” in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1, ed. Tom Cohen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Open Humanities Press, 2012). Italics in the original.
  90. 90. Itō, Sōzō rajio, 132.
  91. 91. Itō, Sōzō rajio, 132.
  92. 92. Satoru Miura, “The Effects of Radioactive Contamination on the Forestry Industry and Commercial Mushroom-Log Production in Fukushima, Japan,” in Agricultural Implications of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, ed. Tomoko Nakanishi and Keitaro Tanoi (Tokyo: Springer, 2016), 145–160.
  93. 93. Miura, “The Effects of Radioactive Contamination,” 147.
  94. 94. Haniya Yutaka, Shirei III (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1996), 232.
  95. 95. Haniya, Shirei III, 232.
  96. 96. Haniya, Shirei III, 232.
  97. 97. Haniya Yutaka, “Kodama,” Haniya Yutaka Zenshū (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1999), 11:55.
  98. 98. Haniya, “Kodama,” Haniya Yutaka Zenshū, 11:56.
  99. 99. Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 3. Peters claims “we can regard media as enabling environments that provide habitats for diverse forms of life, including other media.”
  100. 100. Itō, Sōzō rajio, 71.
  101. 101. Haniya, Shirei III, 234.

4. Botanical Regeneration

  1. 1. maffchannel, “‘Ki de tsukurō’ hen,” YouTube video, 1:02, November 27, 2023, https://youtu.be/4I-L1R_54z4?si=yQBoVf_JpHVEFxxr.
  2. 2. “Ki de mirai tsukurō,” Yomiuri Shinbun, October 23, 2013.
  3. 3. Japanese Forestry Agency, “Annual Report on Forest and Forestry in Japan Fiscal Year 2014 (Summary),” (Tokyo: Japanese Forestry Agency, 2014), 3, http://www.rinya.maff.go.jp/j/kikaku/hakusyo/26hakusyo/pdf/h26summary.pdf.
  4. 4. “Chikyū ondanka bōshi no tame no kokusaiteki na torikumi,” Kizukai.com, accessed January 28, 2024, https://www.kidukai.com/learn/undou_non.php.
  5. 5. Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 1.
  6. 6. Peter Dauvergne, Shadows in the Forest: Japan and the Politics of Timber in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 5–6.
  7. 7. Dauvergne, Shadows in the Forest, 2.
  8. 8. John Knight, Waiting for Wolves in Japan: An Anthropological Study of People-Wildlife Relations (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 35.
  9. 9. Christopher Dole et al., “When Is Catastrophe? An Introduction,” in The Time of Catastrophe: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Age of Catastrophe, Christopher Dole et al. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 1.
  10. 10. The authoritative Japanese dictionary Nihonkokugo daijiten lists the first occurrence of the term (in its variant form of somaudo) in the Tonyōshū, a text dating to the late fourteenth century/early fifteenth century.
  11. 11. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “A Threat to Holocene Resurgence Is a Threat to Livability,” in The Anthropology of Sustainability, ed. Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 52. Italics in the original.
  12. 12. Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 4.
  13. 13. Jasper Sharp, “Fire Festival,” Midnight Eye, accessed January 28, 2024, http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/fire-festival. See also Elliot Stein, Stephan Harvey, and Harlan Jacobson. “The 23rd New York Film Festival,” Film Comment 21, no. 6 (1985): 68.
  14. 14. Anne McKnight, Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
  15. 15. In addition to criticism of Kawase’s decision to minimize anti-Olympic protestors and blur out their faces in her official film, Kawase has also received criticism for suggesting that those opposing the Olympics were paid protestors in an NHK program about the making of the documentary. See Masato Nishida, “NHK Apologizes for False Label of ‘Paid Protester’ Against Olympics,” The Asahi Shimbun, January 10, 2022, https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14518868.
  16. 16. Nina Cornyetz, “Peninsular Cartography: Topology in Nakagami Kenji’s Kishū,” in Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, ed. Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent. (London: Routledge, 2010), 133. Emphasis in original.
  17. 17. D. Max Moerman, Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005), 44.
  18. 18. Moerman, Localizing Paradise, 1.
  19. 19. Yamaguchi Masao/, Himatsuri (Tokyo: Riburopōto, 1985), 60.
  20. 20. Moerman, Localizing Paradise, 43.
  21. 21. Gotō Shin, Asu naki mori: kamemushi sensei ga kumano de kataru (Tokyo: Shinhyōron, 2008), 217.
  22. 22. Totman, The Green Archipelago, 139.
  23. 23. “Kaso taisaku,” Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, accessed January 28, 2024, https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_sosiki/jichi_gyousei/c-gyousei/2001/kaso/kasomain0.htm.
  24. 24. “Kaso taisaku.”
  25. 25. Yamaguchi, Himatsuri, 30.
  26. 26. Arthur Nolletti Jr., “Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s ‘Himatsuri’: An Analysis,” Film Criticism 10, no. 3 (1986): 53.
  27. 27. Himatsuri, Promotional Pamphlet (Tōhō Films, 1985).
  28. 28. Himatsuri, Promotional Pamphlet.
  29. 29. Himatsuri, Promotional Pamphlet.
  30. 30. Inamoto Tadashi, Ki no koe (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1997), 94.
  31. 31. John Knight, “Rural Revitalization in Japan: Spirit of the Village and Taste of the Country,” Asian Survey 34, no. 7 (1994): 636.
  32. 32. For information on the incident and its influence on Nakagami’s screenplay and novelization of Himatsuri, see Moriyasu Toshihisa, “Nakagami Kenji ‘Himatsuri’—eiga kara shōsetsu e,” Utsunomiya Daigaku kenkyū gakubu kiyō 61, no. 1 (2011): 17–28.
  33. 33. Yamaguchi, Himatsuri, 70.
  34. 34. Nakagami Kenji, Nakagami Kenji Zenshū (Tokyo: Shueisha, 1996), 8:583.
  35. 35. Yamaguchi, Himatsuri, 52. The summary of the film included in its promotional pamphlet describes Tatsuo’s actions as “aibu,” a kind of loving caress that has romantic, if not sexual, overtones. Nakagami’s screenplay is less overt: “Tatsuo raises both hands and clings to the tree as the rain falls on his face.” Nakagami, Nakagami Kenji Zenshū, 8:584.
  36. 36. In an interview with Ueno Chizuko, Nakagami Kenji posits that the high-angle shot used in the film’s climax represents “the point of view of the goddess [kami no shiten].” See Yamaguchi, Himatsuri, 27.
  37. 37. The Kumano nendaiki (Chronicles of Kumano, ~sixteenth century) locates the origin of the ritual to the reign of Emperor Bidatsu (572–585). See Miyake Hitoshi, ed., Yama no matsuri to geinō (Tokyo: Hirakawa shuppansha, 1984), 181.
  38. 38. Yama no matsuri to geinō, 181.
  39. 39. Sara E. Jensen and Guy R. McPherson, Living with Fire: Fire Ecology and Policy for the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 2.
  40. 40. Nathaniel Brodie, Charles Goodrich, and Frederick J. Swanson, eds., Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 122.
  41. 41. Yamaguchi, Himatsuri, 34.
  42. 42. “Kaso taisaku.”
  43. 43. Hiroki Koizumi, “More Than Half of All Municipalities in Japan Defined as ‘Depopulated,’” The Asahi Shimbun, February 7, 2022, https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14532405.
  44. 44. Vision, Promotional Pamphlet (LDH Pictures, 2018).
  45. 45. “The Weald (1997),” Kawase Naomi, accessed January 28, 2024, http://www.kawasenaomi.com/kumie/en/works/2015/03/post_23.html.
  46. 46. “The Weald (1997).”
  47. 47. See Totman’s The Green Archipelago for a thorough analysis of just how much lumber was used during the Nara period to build both religious and imperial buildings. According to Totman, Tōdaiji alone used enough wood in its construction to build “three thousand ordinary 1950s-style (18-by-24-foot) Japanese dwellings.” Totman, The Green Archipelago, 17.
  48. 48. Katherine Connell, “Kawase Naomi’s ‘Vision’: Poetic Worlds and Vegetal Camerawork,” Another Gaze, October 2, 2018, https://www.anothergaze.com/naomi-kawases-vision-poetic-worlds-vegetal-camerawork/.
  49. 49. According to the films’ promotional materials, this tree is named the moronjo no ki and is known for its medicinal properties. The entry for the nezumisashi tree on Uekipedia (an online field guide of Japanese trees) states that the medicine made from moronjo no ki is used for urinary problems, rheumatism, nerve pain, and the common cold.
  50. 50. Vision, Promotional Pamphlet.
  51. 51. Vision, Promotional Pamphlet.
  52. 52. Vision, Promotional Pamphlet.
  53. 53. Forest Under Story, 121.
  54. 54. Vision, Promotional Pamphlet.
  55. 55. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 49.
  56. 56. Vision, Promotion Pamphlet. There is a particular irony at work in Vision’s hope to destroy the ego. Kawase has been criticized throughout her career for an egoistic focus in her films, particularly in her early documentary work. See Abé Markus Nornes, “The Postwar Documentary Trace: Groping in the Dark,” Positions: East Asia Culture Critique 10 (2002): 39–78.
  57. 57. Vision, Promotion Pamphlet.

5. Botanical Migration

  1. 1. As mentioned earlier in this book, “Hiromi Ito” is what the writer prefers to be called in English, and this helps me differentiate between her and writer Itō Seikō.
  2. 2. Itō Hiromi, Kodama kusadama (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2014), 136.
  3. 3. Itō, Kodama kusadama, 135.
  4. 4. Dawn Keetley, “Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?” in Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, ed. Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1.
  5. 5. The unruly qualities of Ito’s poetry fit within the parameters of “phytopoetics,” as theorized by Joela Jacobs. Jacobs’s phytopoetics identify a vegetal agency in literature about plant life that stems from unruly qualities of sexuality and violence, both of which are easily found in Ito’s Wild Grass on the River Bank. See Joela Jacobs, “Phytopoetics: Upending the Passive Paradigm with Vegetal Violence and Eroticism,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 2 (2019): 1–18.
  6. 6. Hiromi Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, trans. Jeffrey Angles (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2015), 35. Ito has written about how she feels that Angles’s English translation of Wild Grass on the Riverbank (from which I quote throughout) has become the “original” version, and that her actual original Japanese version is somehow a translation of Angels’s version (despite having been written earlier). See Itō, Kodama kusadama, 138–139.
  7. 7. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 57. In the English translation, Angles decided to use Latinized names for the plants. He explains his decision, in the introduction to his translation, as a combination of wanting to add to the feeling of becoming botanical in the poem and as a means of defamiliarization.
  8. 8. Hiromi Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, trans. Jon L. Pitt (New York: Nightboat Books, 2023), 4.
  9. 9. “Shocking Photo of Drowned Father and Daughter Highlights Migrants’ Border Peril,” Guardian, June 26, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/25/photo-drowned-migrant-daughter-rio-grande-us-mexico-border.
  10. 10. Jeannie N. Shinozuka, Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 3.
  11. 11. Christy Wampole, Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 2.
  12. 12. The word naturalization in Japanese is kika, which uses the Chinese characters for return and change.
  13. 13. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 55.
  14. 14. Shinozuka, Biotic Borders, 218.
  15. 15. Catriona Sandilands, “Vegetate,” in Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 22. Italics in the original.
  16. 16. Sandilands, “Vegetate,” 22.
  17. 17. Sandilands attempts, in this essay, to reclaim the term vegetate and rethink it not as a term referring to a lack of action but rather as an active verb. Hence her use of the gerund form: “Growing. Populating. Spreading. Invading” (emphasis added). Ito’s work likewise understands plants in this way, as full of motion and activity.
  18. 18. Karen L. F. Houle, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics as Extension or Becoming? The Case of Becoming-Plant,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9, nos. 1/2 (2011), 112.
  19. 19. The poem is included in Ito’s 1985 collection Teritorii-ron 2 (On Territory 2). A translation of the poem by Jeffrey Angles is included in a collection bearing the poem’s name. See Hiromi Ito, Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Ito, trans. Jeffrey Angles (Notre Dame: Action Books, 2009).
  20. 20. Ito, Killing Kanoko, vii. The quote belongs to poet Kido Shuri.
  21. 21. For a more detailed accounting of Ito’s biography, see Jeffrey Angles’s introduction to Wild Grass on the Riverbank, as well as his introductory article to the 2007 U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal issue dedicated to Ito.
  22. 22. Ito recounts in Midori no obasan (Aunt Green-Thumb), her 2005 prose collection that is equal parts gardening advice and personal memoir, that growing plants in the Araceae family (satoimoka, in Japanese) gave her a feeling of “the scent of dusk in the Japanese countryside in spring, here within my home in California.” See Itō Hiromi, Midori no obasan (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2005), 66.
  23. 23. According to the US Department of Justice, between 1994 and 1997 (the year Ito obtained legal immigration status in the United States), California admitted 203,305 legal immigrants. This number constituted 25.5 percent of all immigrants into the United States over this period of time. See “Legal Immigration, Fiscal Year 1997,” US Department of Justice, January 1999, https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/INS_AnnualReport_LegalImmigration_1997_1.pdf. According to the American Immigration Council, by the year 2018, the number of immigrants living in California numbered 10.6 million, half of which had been naturalized. In 2016, undocumented immigrants made up 20 percent of the immigrant population in California. See “Immigrants in California,” American Immigration Council, August 6, 2020, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrants-in-california.
  24. 24. Herbert L. Mason, “Migration and Evolution in Plants,” Madroño 6, no. 4 (2013): 162.
  25. 25. Sandilands, “Vegetate,” 22.
  26. 26. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 91.
  27. 27. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 96.
  28. 28. Mason, “Migration and Evolution in Plants,” 162.
  29. 29. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 23.
  30. 30. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 27. Italics in the original.
  31. 31. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 44.
  32. 32. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 152. The APG (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group) system is the current scientific method of classifying plants. It was introduced in 1998, right around the time Ito began writing about the plants of Southern California.
  33. 33. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 49.
  34. 34. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 43.
  35. 35. Sandilands, “Vegetate,” 19.
  36. 36. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 39–40.
  37. 37. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 40.
  38. 38. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 41.
  39. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 27.
  40. 40. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 27.
  41. 41. Michael Marder, Grafts: Writings on Plants (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 94.
  42. 42. Itō, Midori no obasan, 80–81. Ellipses in the original. The image of vines having “violated” (oakasareteita) Ito is repeated several times in Wild Grass on the Riverbank, as vines are repeatedly described as entering Natsukusa’s mother’s vagina. A troubling scene occurs late in the poem in which Natsukusa herself is violated by vines, seemingly against her will.
  43. 43. In a particularly graphic scene, Natsukusa’s mother uses pruning shears to remove her dead husband’s penis while cutting back dead leaves off plants. See Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 41.
  44. 44. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 81.
  45. 45. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 142.
  46. 46. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 52.
  47. 47. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 143.
  48. 48. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 3.
  49. 49. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 9. In her diagnosis of how plant life comes to be horrific, Dawn Keetley lists, as her third thesis, “Plants Menace with Their Wild, Purposeless Growth” (Keetley, “Six Theses on Plant Horror,” 13). The excessive growth of vines and other active plants in Wild Grass on the Riverbank borders, at times, on being, if not exactly horrific, certainly grotesque. But it is this grotesque penchant for excessive reproduction that Ito laments not being able to achieve in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits.
  50. 50. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 93.
  51. 51. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 63.
  52. 52. Banu Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 121.
  53. 53. Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin, 122.
  54. 54. Michael Marder, “The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy,” Dialogue 51 (2012): 263.
  55. 55. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 64.
  56. 56. Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 162.
  57. 57. Marder, “The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy,” 265.
  58. 58. Marder, “The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy,” 264.
  59. 59. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 28.
  60. 60. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 27.
  61. 61. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 90.
  62. 62. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 92–93.
  63. 63. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 89–90. Italics in original.
  64. 64. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 87.
  65. 65. They were also attempts at writing in a new genre for Ito. In an afterword to the 2016 republication of La Niña (which also includes House Plant and Three Lil’ Japanese), Ito writes of the difficulty she experienced in switching from poetry to literary prose (shōsetsu). In 1999, however, Ito characterized her experiments with prose as an expression of freedom. See Kyōko Ōmori, “‘Finding Our Own English’: Migrancy, Identity, and Language(s) in Itō Hiromi’s Recent Prose,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 32 (2007): 93.
  66. 66. Ito writes in the 2016 afterword to La Niña that the narrating “I” of House Plant and La Niña is Ito herself. See Itō Hiromi, Ra nīnya (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2016), p. 281. Both novellas were nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for Literature, although neither won. Ito expresses some relief in the 2016 afterword at not having won in either case. La Niña did, however, win the Noma Literary Award for New Writers.
  67. 67. See Ōmori’s “‘Finding Our Own English’” for a discussion of the generative potential of the multilingual qualities of House Plant.
  68. 68. Itō Hiromi, “House Plant,” trans. Itō Hiromi and Harold Cohen, U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 32 (2007): 115. Throughout, I quote from this English translation, which was rendered by Itō herself and her then-partner Harold Cohen.
  69. 69. Itō, “House Plant,” 115.
  70. 70. Itō, Ra nīnya, 111.
  71. 71. Itō, “House Plant,” 134.
  72. 72. Itō, “House Plant,” 133.
  73. 73. Wampole, Rootedness, 7.
  74. 74. Itō, “House Plant,” 127.
  75. 75. In 2003, the INS functions were transferred to three new departments within the newly formed Department of Homeland Security: US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
  76. 76. Itō, “House Plant,” 129.
  77. 77. Itō, Ra nīnya, 199–200.
  78. 78. Itō, “House Plant,” 132.
  79. 79. Itō, “House Plant,” 121.
  80. 80. Itō, “House Plant,” 120.
  81. 81. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 64.
  82. 82. Itō, “House Plant,” 119.
  83. 83. Itō, “House Plant,” 119.
  84. 84. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 92–93.
  85. 85. Itō, Ra nīnya, 55.
  86. 86. Itō, Ra nīnya, 190–191. Ito quotes here from a poem by Yamamura Bochō (1884–1924) titled “Landscape” (Fūkei), in which the line “A full field of rape blossoms” is repeated for twenty-four of the twenty-seven lines that make up the poem. Ito references this poem many times throughout her oeuvre, often as a means to describe the overwhelming vitality of plant life.
  87. 87. Itō, Ra nīnya, 238.
  88. 88. Ito has described this section of the narrative as a michiyuki: a narrative device used in premodern Japanese theater and storytelling in which the main characters (often a pair of doomed lovers) travel together before reaching their tragic end. See Itō, Ra nīnya, 284.
  89. 89. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3.
  90. 90. Itō, Ra nīnya, 268.
  91. 91. Itō, Ra nīnya, 268.
  92. 92. Itō, Ra nīnya, 272.
  93. 93. Itō, Ra nīnya, 283.
  94. 94. Itō, Ra nīnya, 284.
  95. 95. Rika makes a point of saying that she can never remember the name, as it “doesn’t seem like English.” The implication is that it has a Spanish name, much like Ito’s home of Encinitas or La Jolla (where the University of California, San Diego is located).
  96. 96. Itō, Ra nīnya, 234–235.
  97. 97. Itō, Ra nīnya, 235.
  98. 98. Itō, Ra nīnya, 245.
  99. 99. Itō, Ra nīnya, 235.
  100. 100. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 94.
  101. 101. It is a sentiment Ito shares with Arakawa Tomotsugu, as discussed in chapter 1 in reference to the writing of Osaki Midori and moss.
  102. 102. Itō, Midori no obasan, 182.
  103. 103. Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, 25.
  104. 104. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 94.
  105. 105. Itō, Ra nīnya, 285.
  106. 106. Itō Hiromi, Tasogareteyuku kosan (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron, 2018), 120.
  107. 107. Itō, Tasogareteyuku kosan, 120.
  108. 108. Itō, Tasogareteyuku kosan, 120–121.
  109. 109. The Hague Abduction Convention is an international treaty meant to regulate the movement of children across national borders. Japan became a party to the Hague Convention in 2014.
  110. 110. Itō Hiromi, Michiyukiya (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2020), 157.
  111. 111. Itō, Michiyukiya, 157. The Alien Species Act was enacted to designate a species as invasive if it has “adverse effects on ecosystems.” See “Invasive Alien Species Act,” Ministry of Environment, June 2, 2004, https://www.env.go.jp/en/nature/as/040427.pdf.
  112. 112. Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 94.

Epilogue

  1. 1. Gregory Bateson, Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Cornelia and Michael Bessie Books, 1991), 240.
  2. 2. Miura Shion, Ai naki sekai (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha, 2018), 88.
  3. 3. Osaki Midori, Osaki Midori Zenshū (Tokyo: Sōjusha, 1979), 372.
  4. 4. Miura, Ai naki sekai, 92.
  5. 5. Miura, Ai naki sekai, 92.
  6. 6. “Arabidopsis: The Model Plant,” US National Science Foundation, accessed January 28, 2024, https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2002/bio0202/model.htm.
  7. 7. Ian Sample, “Cress Seeds Grown in Moon Dust Raise Hopes for Lunar Crops,” Guardian, May 12, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/may/12/cress-seeds-grown-in-moon-dust-raise-hopes-for-lunar-crops.
  8. 8. Masataka Nakano et al., “Entanglement of Arabidopsis Seedings to a Mesh Substrate under Microgravity Conditions in KIBO on the ISS,” Plants 11, no. 7 (2022): 956, https://doi.org/10.3390/plants11070956.
  9. 9. Yuri Aratani et al., “Green Leaf Volatile Sensory Calcium Transduction in Arabidopsis,” Nature Communications 14 (2023).
  10. 10. The videos can be seen here: https://phys.org/news/2023-10-real-time-visualization-plant-plant-communications-airborne.html.
  11. 11. Miura, Ai naki sekai, 88.
  12. 12. Noland Lendved, “Deep in the Weeds,” GROW Magazine (Fall 2019), https://grow.cals.wisc.edu/departments/features/deep-in-the-weeds.
  13. 13. Keita Tamura and Hidemasa Bono, “Meta-Analysis of RNA Sequencing Data of Arabidopsis and Rice under Hypoxia,” Life 12, no. 7 (2022).
  14. 14. Masahiro Morioka, “A Phenomenological Study of ‘Herbivore Men,’” Review of Life Studies 4 (September 2013), 1.
  15. 15. Morioka, “A Phenomenological Study of ‘Herbivore Men,’” 1.
  16. 16. Morioka, “A Phenomenological Study of ‘Herbivore Men,’” 13–15.
  17. 17. Morioka, “A Phenomenological Study of ‘Herbivore Men,’” 15.
  18. 18. Miura, Ai naki sekai, 444.
  19. 19. Fukasawa Maki, “Shokubutsu no kenkyū ni bottō suru joshi to, yōshokuya minari danshi no yukue,” Shūkan bunshun, November 15, 2018, https://bunshun.jp/articles/-/9613.
  20. 20. Fukasawa, “Shokubutsu no kenkyū.”
  21. 21. Fukasawa, “Shokubutsu no kenkyū.”
  22. 22. “Arabidopsis: The Model Plant.”
  23. 23. Nicholas Harberd, Seed to Seed: The Secret Life of Plants (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 96.
  24. 24. Harberd, Seed to Seed, 300.

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