Acknowledgments

This book took many years to germinate and is the product of many hands. If not for the copious support and encouragement I received along the way, this book would never have come to fruition. I would like to thank my former professors in the East Asian Languages and Cultures and Film and Media Departments at the University of California, Berkeley, for planting the seeds in the early days of this project. Funding from the Japan Foundation was instrumental in allowing for research in Japan, including in the southernmost reaches of the archipelago, the Ogasawara Islands. I am thankful to the Japan Foundation for inviting me to participate in the inaugural cohort of the US-Japan Junior Scholars Networking Seminar, through which I had the great fortune of meeting Sakura Christmas, Alyssa Paredes, Daiichi Sugai, Wakana Suzuki, Satsuki Takahashi, and Karen Thornber.

I am indebted to Waseda University for providing me a place to read, think, and write during the year I spent conducting research for what ultimately became this book. A special thank you to Toba Koji for his guidance and generosity in serving as my faculty advisor at Waseda. Thank you, also, to the Center for Japanese Studies at UC Berkeley. This book would not have been possible without the labor of those who worked at the UC Berkeley C. V. Starr East Asian Library, the Waseda University Library, the National Diet Library of Japan, and the Langson Library at the University of California, Irvine.

I am grateful for my colleagues at UC Irvine. They welcomed me into the fold and offered tireless support. Thank you, Chungmoo Choi, David Fedman, Ted Fowler, Jim Fujii, Martin Huang, Kyung Hyun Kim, Susan Klein, André Keiji Kunigami, Margherita Long, James Nisbet, Bert Scruggs, Serk-Bae Suh, Bert Winther-Tamaki, Judy Wu, and Hu Ying. I have learned much from working with graduate students at UCI, and so I would like to thank Brandon Blackburn, Zane Casimir, Monica Cho, Hiroshi Clark, Megan Cole, Miguel Angel Quirarte Hernandez, Blossom Jeong, Soojin Jeong, Adam Miller, Sara Newsome, Nikita Prokhorov, Xiangu Qi, Yaqi Wang, Sophie Wheeler, Vanessa Wong, and Xiaoyang Yue.

For their unending generosity and friendship, I express my heartfelt thanks to Pedro Bassoe, Daryl Maude, and Linda Zhang, all of whom have read various parts of this book along the way and helped me sustain a life outside of the book through coffee, concerts, cake, and cinema. I have many other colleagues to thank for their friendship, advice, and encouragement since our shared time in Berkeley (and beyond), including Marjorie Burge, Xiangjun Feng, Julia Keblinska, Matt Mewhinney, Shelby Oxenford, Evelyn Shih, Wendy Wang, Chelsea Ward, Matt Wild, Melissa Van Wyk, and Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang. A special thank you to Pat Noonan for his support and friendship dating back even further.

Over the past several years, I have been lucky to meet and receive valuable feedback from many scholars whose work I admire, including Jonathan Abel, Jeffrey Angles, Jakobina Arch, Reiko Abe Auestad, Vanessa Baker, Brian Bergstrom, Kate Brelje, Kathleen Burns, Andrew Campana, C. Anne Claus, Rebeca Copeland, Rachel DiNitto, Terese Gagnon, Weisong Gao, Kazue Harada, Brian Hurley, Joela Jacobs, Melody Jue, Megan Kaminski, Saeko Kimura, ann-elise lewallen, Jiajun Liang, Christine Marran, Anne McKnight, Natania Meeker, Lucas Mertehikian, Keitaro Morita, Chiara Pavone, Franz Prichard, Mina Qiao, Paul Roquet, Aike Rots, Eric Siercks, Douglas Slaymaker, Anthony Stott, Keijiro Suga, Wakako Suzuki, and Victoria Young.

I would like to thank the editorial board of the journal Plant Perspectives, the Plant Initiative, and the Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network for helping create a vegetally minded community across the globe. The UCI Center for Environmental Humanities has been an important network that has helped shape ideas for this book. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dumbarton Oaks, as I learned much and met inspiring plant people as a virtual fellow in their Plant Humanities Lab in 2023. The UCI Humanities Center and the University of California Humanities Research Center have also been a great support over the past few years. This book was published with a support grant from the UCI Humanities Center.

This book has benefited from my participation in several conferences and workshops. Early ideas for chapter 4 were shared at a 2017 international workshop co-organized by UC Berkeley and the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature titled “Food, Agriculture and Human Impacts on the Environment: Japan, Asia, and Beyond.” Parts of chapter 2 were presented at the virtual “Russia/Japan: Residues, Materialities, Environments” conference organized by Elena Fratto, Franz Prichard, and Ryo Morimoto in 2020. Parts of chapter 4 were presented at the University of Oslo “Animism and Ecocriticism Workshop,” organized by Reiko Abe Auestad in 2022. Chapter 5 was developed in part through presentations at the 2022 Transpacific Workshop, held at UC Riverside and organized by Setsu Shigematsu, Anne McKnight, and John Kim, and at the Second International Environmental Humanities Conference on Critical Animal and Plant Studies, held (virtually) at Cappadocia University, also in 2022. The 2023 “Plant Animacies” workshop at Harvey Mudd College, organized by Kathleen Burns, helped clarify many overarching concepts in this book. I received valuable feedback at each of these gatherings.

Ann Sherif and Albert L. Park, the series editors with The Environments of East Asia series at Cornell University Press, have offered invaluable feedback along the way, making this a much better book than it was before their involvement. I could not have asked for better guides through this process. My sincere thanks to Alexis Shimon, who likewise saw potential in this project and helped it bloom. India Miraglia offered much-needed help in securing rights for the images included in the coming pages. The feedback I received from two anonymous reviewers helped push the book into a more critically precise direction, and I am grateful for their kind and insightful words.

I have thanked plants in previous publications, and this book will be no exception. Moss on the streets of Kyoto (a photo of which appears in chapter 1) taught me about multiplicity and the strength of laying low. The dendrocacalia tree taught me about perseverance and adaptation and about the joy and possible futility of the chase. The ice plant of Southern California has helped me grapple with notions of native, naturalized, and invasive. The cacti and wildflowers of the UCI Nature Preserve helped me process my grief during the COVID-19 pandemic. The many plants in my garden—passionfruit, papaya, sage, lavender, succulents, and chiles—have taught me about mutual aid and care work. I am indebted to these botanical teachers.

I am eternally grateful for my late father, Lawrence, my mother, Jacqui, as well as my stepfather, Jim. They have shown me nothing but love and support. Thank you also to my siblings, James and Cait. Over the years I spent working on this book, I was lucky enough to share my home with several more-than-human family members. Thank you Boba, Spruce, and Sugi for your own respective forms of support. Thank you also to Jem Fanvu for her knowledge of Pando and for getting me away from the desk and into the concert venues of Los Angeles.

This book is for Petronella Keryn Sovella, my partner in life and my biggest supporter. If this book is a plant, then we grew it together.