Small eco-friendly town in southwestern Japan developing itself as mushroom-producing center

June 28, 2019

Small eco-friendly town in southwestern Japan developing itself as mushroom-producing center

The mushrroom, "kinoko" in the Japanese language, is one of the most traditionally important health foods for Japanese. Many Japanese, notably the elderly, know about a convenient way to remember seven health foods consumed in Japan over the centuries.
This represents a combination of the initials of the seven foodstuffs, "ma", "go", "wa", "ya", "sa", "shi", and "i." They individually mean the bean, the sesame, the wakame seaweed, the vegetable, the fish, the shiitake mushroom, and the potato, but when pronounced as a phrase, that means "The grandchild is gentle."
Shiitake mushrooms, the most commonly used ones, cannot be found at the farmers market operated by a group affiliated with Ohki Town, Fukuoka Prefecture, southwestern Japan, but more nutritious, fresh mushrooms have caught on well with visitors at the market.
At an innermost corner at the market is a gallery-like cooled room where many kinds of mushrooms grown on the fungal bed pot are on the shelf. Consumers can pick whichever mushroom they want from the ceramic pot for 100 to 130 yen apiece. If they want to have it with the pot as a whole, they can do it with an additional charge of 100 yen.
The mushroom gallery is air conditioned all the time. "We keep the temperature in the room at around 11 degrees centigrade and the humidity level at 72 percent," a shopkeeper said.
"One of the species we have right there is a product developed by ourselves, you see," she said proudly.
The originally grown product is an enokitake mushroom with very soft, fine white filament hyphae, which, when boiled, can be served as something like a noodle.
Ohki Town is a typically rural town with a population of 14,000, located on lower, flat terrain, but it began to draw attention from municipality officials and environmentalists in 2005, when its initiative to be a recycling-oriented society led to the launch of a kitchen waste-based biomass plant project.
The initiative came at a time when its mainstay farming industry, mainly rice growing and "igusa" rush grass production, came to a fix.
The town has an area of 18 square kilometers, 14 percent of the total occupied with irrigation creeks. By actively using abundantly available water, local government people and citizens chose to develop the community as an eco-friendly town to overcome the difficulties.
As another effort to be a recycling-oriented society, a citizens' group formed an organization to promote mushroom production by using farming wastes and other refuse as materials for mushroom fungal beds.
Several local mushroom growers supply their products to the farmers' market, while the mushrooms are not just for sale but also used for meals served at a restaurant adjacent to the market, with a favorable supply-consumption cycle established.
The project has boosted the town to one of the biggest mushroom-producing centers in western Japan. The Ohki initiative is seen to be an attractive community-revitalizing model, as depopulation over the past decades has hard hit rural regions in many parts of Japan.