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Meet the Growers
A visit to Tamura Farms
Arriving on Location
Takafumi Tamura’s reputation preceded him: from the moment I entered the mushroom business in Japan, I heard stories of the “Nameko Sage” (one of his many nicknames). Outlandish descriptions of Mr. Tamura’s farm, “on top of a mountain” and “way at the end of a super-narrow mountain road” gave his comparatively small operation an outsized mythos. But between the COVID-19 pandemic and doing the groundwork for this industry journal, I never seemed to find the opportunity to visit Mr. Tamura for an expose.

I finally made my way to Mr. Tamura’s farm in October of this year. On the roughly one hour and twenty-minute drive, I realized that some of the elements of the mythos around the nameko sage were slight exaggerations. After exiting the Kanto high-speed toll road, it was fairly straightforward to get to Mr. Tamura’s farm. After just one turn, we followed the same, fairly typical 2-lane mountain road for nearly 10km before turning off on to the narrow mountain road of yore. Except that by Japan standards, this road too was fairly normal and well-paved; narrow but not remarkably so, and steep yet not extraordinarily so.

Mr. Tamura also does not grow nameko on top of a mountain, but if anything, the actual location and set up of the farm were just as impressive and blew away my preconceptions. I had imagined some big, bustling cluster of buildings on top of a flattish mountain, transplanting a mishmash of images from the many mid-sized farms I have been too. That’s why I was confused when our navigation system took us down a narrow driveway to what seemed like a random and indiscreet old Japanese-style home in the countryside. I was almost ready to back out and retrace my steps, but an older gentleman stood further down the drive way beckoning us in with a practiced gesture.

In defense of the descriptions I had heard, while Mr. Tamura’s farm is not on top of a mountain, it’s not far removed from one either. The farm sits across the driveway from the Tamura’s 150-year-old family home, both built on the steep slopes of Mt. Inafukumi, a 1,370-meter peak with commanding panoramas of central Gunma Prefecture and the surrounding mountains. Rather than a mountaintop, though, Mr. Tamura lives in a small mountain hamlet called Akihata, one of nine remaining residents, and, at 66, is the youngest of the bunch.

The mountainside is very steep in this region of Japan, but the mountains are sturdy, consisting mainly of granite with some bands of serpentine and quartz, which make the area less prone to severe landslides than volcanic ranges and primarily limestone mountains. Mr. Tamura’s home and the two buildings housing his farm, like the rest of the homes in Akihata hamlet, all required people to stack stones by hand into a wall, then fill in the space behind that wall in order to carve out short terraces of flat space.

The soil in the area is very rocky and poor. Unsuitable for rice farming, traditionally the area grew tubers, primarily konyaku but also sweet potatoes, and otherwise relied on logging and forestry-related industries such as charcoal production. Up until Mr. Tamura was a young child, the family raised silkworms, as many families in the region did as a source of side-income, being near the now UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Tomioka Silk Mills, which was then a center of Japan’s domestic silk industry.
Meeting Mr. Tamura
Beginning with Mr. Tamura’s late father, the family started growing nameko and natural log-incubated shiitake over 55 years ago. Mr. Tamura entered into various apprenticeships to study mushroom farming and other skills for three years, starting at age 16, and then at age 19, began helping grow mushrooms on the farm. That puts Mr. Tamura in his 47th year of nameko farming, and I joked that once he reaches his 50th anniversary in the business, he really will be a nameko sage.
We sat at a table under a covered garage beside one of the two farm buildings. To my right was an old maple tree, and to my left was a wall clock whose time ran twenty minutes fast. Mr. Tamura offered us some green tea, and while we sat in silence waiting for him to return from his home with tea, the air resonated with the calls of various birds, wasps and dragonflies buzzed around us, and the mountain breeze brought chilly but almost sweet-smelling air straight from dense secondary forests.

Akihata is a small and aging outcrop of civilization in the midst of nature, truncated from the surrounding settlements and quite distinct from Kanra Town, the municipality it is technically contained in. Going to Akihata felt like stepping back in time to another era. Without the sound of cars, construction, or factories, and surrounded by mountains and forests, the Tamura farm sits on its narrow ledge at around 650 meters elevation: the perfect natural environment for mushrooms.
After Mr. Tamura sat down again, we continued our introductions and then our conversations ranged from the surroundings, to his past and then about the mushroom business and back to him again. He was already finished with work for the day and eager to talk about the history of the house, the farm, and the surrounding area. We stood up, and he walked us to a view-point of the mountain on the opposing valley, where he pointed out the autumn colors just starting to filter down from the summits. He even pointed out the area, out of direct sight due to those mountains, where Japan Airlines Flight 123 had crashed in 1985, the deadliest single airplane crash in aviation history, (the famed Japanese pop singer, Kyu Sakamoto also died in the crash).

I only include this tidbit in the series because it was such a sudden and unexpected diversion of the conversation at the time. Then, standing there, listening to Mr. Tamura speak, I could envision the rescue helicopters streaming across the sky and out of sight in the early morning hours after the crash. The air of tragedy played in stark contrast to the idyllic mountain landscape before me. It was such a striking and unrelated image to nameko, but how could I leave out such a profound part of the history of the landscape I described at Akihata?

Walking through the Tamura farm
Right after hearing about this plane crash, we walked the rest of the way down the driveway, to the outer of the two buildings of the farm. Mr. Tamura led us up to the storehouse for the sawdust. There he uses the small shovel car he has on site to spread the sawdust he will use in the next batch to an even height of about 30 centimeters (roughly one foot). This keeps the sawdust from fermenting too quickly and having it spread out across the concrete floor keeps the temperature of the sawdust he will use the next day from rising above the ambient temperature.

From the storehouse it is just a few steps to reach the mixer. I am used to seeing mixers either elevated or on ground level, but this was the first time I saw a mixer below. The steep slope means the mixer is below the storehouse, and a series of worn wooden ramps make for smooth unloading into the three cubic meter mixer. Mr. Tamura currently uses a fairly standard mix of wheat and rice bran plus calcium-based pH stabilizers. He then showed us the pulley system he uses to transplant incubated shiitake blocks to a fruiting room in a log house in the mountains.

The terrace ends at a small cliff beside the pulley. We followed a small mountain path around the sawdust storehouse to the old abandoned house of some distant relatives, which has sat empty for 20 years. There was a faint sadness to Mr. Tamura’s voice as he related what a shame it was that the house had been left to rot. While still standing, weeds and shrubs were growing from the ceiling, and from the windows I could see the yellowed, peeling paper of the sliding panels inside the house.

I followed the path up to try and get a shot of the trolley or to see where it led to. However, the old house is built on the very edge of steep gulch and the trail does not extend beyond the house. The shiitake fruiting room is on the other side of that gulch, and the walking path goes along in a meandering loop that takes fifteen to twenty minutes to reach (and the farm was not producing any shiitake at the moment anyway). I couldn’t get any good shots through the trees, and so we returned to the nameko farm.
My biggest misconception prior to arriving, was to think I was heading to a typical mushroom farm. Mr. Tamura doesn’t have any employees. In the past, he worked together with his parents, but now he and his wife (who is originally from Tokyo), run everything themselves. For the first time, I saw something that was a completely family run operation. Mr. Tamura led us down from the mixer, to show us the bag filling machines and black cultivation bags that are standard for bag cultivation of nameko in Japan.

With his well-worn automatic bagger, Mr. Tamura can process a batch of 700~1200 roughly 2.5 kg-sized bags in half a morning. After talking a bit about the various kinds of bagging machinery that the farm had used in the past, Mr. Tamura showed us his small, custom-built autoclave. What really blew my mind was being led to the inoculation room. Mr. Tamura finishes cooling off the blocks in a small, cramped room, which is, critically, not a clean room.

That’s right, Mr. Tamura doesn’t even use a clean room, though he does use an inoculation and sealing machine along with standard Japanese filter bags. The farm, he boasted, is in the ideal natural location for nameko_emdash_a clean mountain forest. The air and water are all very clean, and he also uses smaller amounts of nutritional supplements than commercial farms. Mr. Tamura recounted how in the past, after a rain, it was perfectly fine to unload the carts of sterilized substrate and set them outside in the open air over night to cool off.

There is some contamination, but contamination and widespread failures in incubation or pinning have never been an issue for Mr. Tamura. Again, he credits this to the clean natural environment, ideal for finding nameko in the wild in, and also to the various adjustments and specifics of his cultivation process (including using fresh sawdust and doing everything he can to keep it from fermenting prior to usage). Mr. Tamura also noted that using good, fresh spawn from reputable spawn makers is very important.

When we toured the farm, Mr. Tamura had just that morning emptied out one of the two incubation rooms, so he showed us around that room. The first thing that caught my eye was that, at the very front of the room nearest to the door, there were two black cultivation bags, lying curiously on their side. The rest of the room was empty. Mr. Tamura explained that when he was moving the bags off the shelves and into carts for the fruiting room, he’d felt these two bags needed a little more time to incubate. These two bags weren’t failed, so he thought it would be a waste to throw them away with the other failed bags, so he had laid them on their side and expected in a week or so they would finish incubating.

Mr. Tamura explained to me what to search for when I grabbed the bag from the side. To my surprise, I could somewhat sense what he was talking about it_emdash_though only at a “now that you say it…” level. The very bottom of the bag was firm, almost hard, but the feeling towards the top of the bag, felt up by my index finger and thumb, had a slight sponginess to it. Mr. Tamura explained that after 47 years, it only takes a single moment of feeling a bag for him to know whether it is good to move to the fruiting room, needs more time, or needs to be thrown away. He can even enter the incubation room, and when a batch has gone very bad (even the nameko sage is not infallible), he can smell the difference, and even tell by how strong the smell is how bad the batch has gone. I smiled and told him that if you know what you’re doing, you really don’t need to see inside the bag during cultivation, and Mr. Tamura said that was the importance of experience.

The other thing that struck me about the room was the shelving. The metal frames themselves were hand-welded by Mr. Tamura many years ago. The shelves where the inoculated blocks rested during incubation consisted of curious wooden boards that simply sat in between the metal frames, not nailed to anything. Upon closer inspection, I took a few of the boards out and saw different city names and market names and other miscellanea. Mr. Tamura explained that more than 30 years ago, they used to pick up used fish boxes_emdash_the wooden crates packed with ice that fish markets once shipped to the interior of Japan (now replaced with Styrofoam), pack them with inoculated blocks, and fruit nameko in the forests.
This was more than thirty years ago, but when they switched to using the fruiting room, he broke down all of the boxes and used them for shelving in the incubation rooms. Now he can periodically remove all the wood boards of the shelves and lay them outside in the sun if he needs to disinfect the room. I think what struck me most of all was his economical attitude of doing more with less, something I don’t think big business farms can do. I’m too used to dealing with big operations who file yearly accounting reports for each department, who have every expense for the year planned and their profits planned down to just a few cents (USD) on the kilogram, with depreciation costs and who otherwise need to maximize yields and production, that it was a new experience seeing what family-farming looks like.

Mr. Tamura trained in welding and welded the various carts and shelves himself. He’s also a hobby mechanic, and repairs any issues that pop up with his machinery himself. His wife delivers their product to a few road-side service areas with local produce sections and some local supermarkets, where they sell it directly, minus only a service charge. With just a pair of retirees no longer working the farm full time, they sell twenty tons of nameko a year and a few more tons of shiitake, with no inputs other than sawdust bought from a facility on a neighboring mountain, electricity, kerosene, cultivation bags, spawn, and nutritional supplements. In the past, when they were working fulltime and his father was still involved in the business, the farm was selling more than forty tons of nameko a year.

I saw what a farm can do with just a few pieces of basic, and not particularly costly, pieces of durable equipment, used over the long-term. I also saw a lot of freedom, which reminded me of another small farm I profiled once, Fuji Kinoko Center. Both farms fill as many bags/bottles as they can handle, and harvest what they get. They don’t need yields to be too fantastic, and they worked at an efficient, but manageable pace. This compares to the hectic environment at big mushroom farms I’ve worked and trained at, where there is enormous pressure to churn through fruiting room after fruiting room, or package mountains of boxes every hour on the hour, all in order to barely churn a profit.

The big operations are necessary, but the system creates an unfortunate reliance on cheap wholesalers and distributor networks, as well as big supermarkets that impose their own, ridiculously low prices on growers. Thus, big farms run with smaller margins than family farms like the Tamura’s and yet have lots of additional expenses for more expansive machinery, forklifts, and dozens or hundreds of employees. In practice, this means they have to squeeze every possible drop of productivity out of everything from the substrate to the employees, and everything is paced to run at maximum production. Since the profit per unit is almost nonexistent, the only solution is to produce at volume.

The curious aspect of this system is that the consumer end price is unchanged. Mr. Tamura told me he sells 140-gram packs of nameko for 120 yen. This price is much higher than the average wholesale price of nameko in 2022 in the Tokyo central wholesale markets, which was 425 yen per kilogram, but the price is essentially the same as what I pay to the supermarket when I buy nameko. The end price for consumers doesn’t change, yet big farms have to deal with more people having their fingers in the pie. Their response, however (to produce more) just drives the prices further down, continuing a decades-long issue of oversupply within the Japanese mushroom industry.

Before heading to the fruiting rooms on the last step of our farm tour, we stepped out into Mr. Tamura’s vegetable garden below the nameko farm buildings. Hemmed in by a hodgepodge of fencing and wires to keep deer out, the vegetable garden had an incline comparable to a hiking trail. From the garden, I could see the rock wall built into the hillside to provide a flat slope for constructing the buildings for the farm and houses above. A thin layer of shattered rock covered the top soil_emdash_something necessary to leave in place in order to prevent rapid erosion.

Mr. Tamura described how, after sending the bags through a separation machine that removes the plastic (he only cuts the top part of the bag, as he fruits only the top of the block for nameko) and grinds the spent block back into sawdust, he delivers the spent substrate to a nearby dairy farm. The dairy farmer there is a friend who mixes cow manure with the spent mushroom compost and then further composts it for a few months. The farmer sells the resulting compost, and Mr. Tamura picks up a few loads of it a year to incorporate into his garden. This has definitely made the poor topsoil a lot more productive and it absorbs water better with the added organic mass.

As I walked halfway down the steep slope with an experienced hiker’s gait, the expansive view of the mountains on the other side of the valley was so beautiful that I stood in place admiring it for a minute. Even more astonishing was to hear that Mr. Tamura’s mother, who is in her 90s, is the person primarily responsible for the garden. He catalogued the various rows of vegetables: at the back there was taro, then several rows of onions and garlic, then some carrots and daikon radish, to the right there was napa cabbage and spinach, while we were standing next to some mostly depleted eggplants. During the summer they had cucumbers and tomatoes. Mr. Tamura said that he, his wife, and his mother were mostly self-sufficient when it came to vegetables, and that he even had a hunting license.

After a short digression that included pictures of hunted deer and an explanation on how to carve the meat (deer overpopulation is actually a considerable problem disrupting the ecosystems of Japan’s forested interior, so for him this was a way to be self-sufficient and help the ecological balance of his area), we turned back for the fruiting room, passing by a rows of various pepper varieties before walking around the second building and entering the fruiting room. The fruiting room also surprised me. Wall-to-wall nameko, almost like an art installation, greeted us when we entered the room, along with the clean, faint twang of nameko in the cool, damp air.

To harvest nameko, Mr. Tamura cuts the top of the bags, exposing the top of the substrate block to light which then triggers pinning. His system places the substate blocks on their side and packs them tight in place in a smooth seamless wall of substrate blocks that he then walks along, harvesting with scissors. He actually intentionally left a few spots of nameko behind during the morning harvest to show us, and proceeded to display his harvesting prowess. Holding a tub in one hand just beneath the block he was harvesting, Mr. Tamura sheared through an entire section in around thirty seconds_emdash_while talking about the process the entire time. When we weighed the harvest out, it was approximately 560 grams. I estimated that approaching it seriously, Mr. Tamura could easily harvest in excess of a hundred kilograms an hour by himself.

On some of the blocks that had already been harvested, the second flush of nameko were already bubbling up. The ability to get a second flush on the same substrate, and a decent yielding second flush at that, is one major advantage of cultivating nameko in bag systems, Mr. Tamura said. He then took us over to another room, where the second flush was almost finished, to show the end-stage for the blocks. He doesn’t change rooms. When one batch has been totally flushed, he empties out and cleans that room, then transports the next batch to that room. The room he showed us was due to be emptied in a day or two, and aside from a few patches of blocks that still had some spriggy nameko growing off them, the rest were bald and harvested. Most of the substrate blocks had developed a film of greenish or brownish molds (primarily Trichoderma) and the smell of the room had shifted from the anodyne scent of nameko to a musty, mildewy smell.

After returning to the covered awning, we received ample samples of Mr. Tamura’s prized nameko. The difference between bottle-cultivated nameko, he said, was the smaller, uniform size of the caps and the long, soft, unbruised stems. With good nameko, the stems are edible. Bottle cultivation can also lead to higher rates of malformed or lumpy caps, as opposed to the perfectly rounded caps with even coloring in his own crop. The improved quality of nameko is also seen in the increased viscosity, like okra, of the cooked product.

We took a few more pictures of the house, the goldfish pond, received some bottled water made from locally sourced water (his family drinks spring water tapped from a well), and again heard about the extremely clean, natural environment and how idea it was for mushroom farming. I saw Mr. Tamura’s three cars, and heard about his different travels around Japan that he has begun taking in recent years, and also heard about his kids and grandchildren, all of whom have left the country life behind and live in the city now. I thought that maybe Mr. Tamura represents the last generation of this farm and this rural homestead (though by American standards, being a 20 minute drive away from supermarkets, themselves right next to a high speed toll road entry gate from which you can reach downtown Tokyo by car in 90 minutes depending on traffic, is not considered particularly isolated).

I thought that it would be a shame if no one followed in his footsteps. A low impact and sustainable farm like the Tamura’s was enough to secure a comfortable living, and even the byproducts became organic fertilizer, both for his own garden and other farmer’s fields. Sunset in autumn in the mountains in Japan comes early and swiftly, as the surrounding peaks block out the setting sun. Even though it was just reaching 4PM, the ambient light had dwindled to a pale twilight when, with those thoughts, everyone made our farewell greetings.
I was left with the impression that mushroom farming is endlessly flexible, and that many systems and even family-run operations can run at considerable scale for decades with just a minimal amount of strategic investment in the right equipment. Low inputs, manageable harvests sold directly, and expertise that allowed fine-toothed management of the process with simple facilities. Most of all, I kept returning to that clock on the way that ran 20 minutes fast. Obviously, it didn’t matter to Mr. Tamura, and I thought that must be nice.

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Meet the Growers

A visit to Tamura Farms