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Meet the Growers
Shinshu Mushroom Workshop
Watching the exotic mushroom industry in North America and Europe from Japan, the explosive popularity of lion’s mane mushrooms (scientific name Hericium erinaceus) has been a recurring story. The shiitake hashtag on Instagram has 278,000 posts, but lion’s mane (which includes the original meaning), is at over 250,000 posts and counting. Lion’s mane mushrooms have attracted lots of attention and profiles on popular nutrition websites and with SNS Influencers for their potential cognitive benefits, including prevention of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Lion’s mane mushrooms are also popular as a vegan/flexitarian replacement for crab meat, chicken, and as an easy-to-use all-purpose exotic mushroom.

Lion’s mane is also native to the Japanese islands. The Japanese name for lion’s mane mushroom is “yamabushi-take,” which literally means (mountain) warrior monk mushroom. The term comes from the decorative tassels that yamabushi, Japan’s ascetic Buddhist hermits who focused their religious practice in the wild and remote mountains, wore on their chest. However, while lion’s mane mushrooms were a delicacy in ancient China, they are not a traditional food in Japan, despite being well-known as an edible mushroom.

I suspect the reason has to do with the relatively neutral smell and flavor of lion’s mane mushrooms. Japanese cuisine uses mushrooms primarily for “dashi” or stock. In Japan, mushrooms are prized for the ability to bring umami flavor to otherwise very simple stocks, and Japanese cooking uses such stocks for miso soup, boiled vegetables, hot pot stews, and even in omelets and noodle dishes. In Japan, the point of using mushrooms is to add a sweet flavor, or an umami flavor, or to bring out other simple elements used in traditional cooking, such as soy sauce, kelp, and bonito flakes.

Japan produces almost no white or brown button mushrooms, but grows over 460,000 metric tons (over one billion pounds) of what Western markets term “exotic mushrooms.” Therefore, it is always surprising to a see a variety of exotic mushrooms historically known and cultivatable in Japan, yet not available in Japan despite being indigenous to the country. I recently met Mr. Masakazu Kubo, the third-generation owner of a mid-sized mushroom farm in Chikuma City, Nagano Prefecture. His farm, Shinshu Mushroom Workshop, grows anywhere from 60~85 percent of all lion’s mane produced in Japan (there are no precise statistics on lion’s mane in Japan because it is such an obscure mushroom variety here). Mr. Kubo’s facility grows between 40~120 tons of lion’s mane annually. Production varies widely because, outside of direct online sales, the farm deals with just three wholesale clients.

Arriving on Location
I arrived at Mr. Kubo’s farm on a hot, humid day typical of Japan’s summer months. A line of kindergarteners in their matching red and blue hats with protective neck covers, marched across the street ahead of me and up the stairs to an unassuming Buddhist temple. Shinshu Mushroom Workshop was located in a particularly picturesque area, tucked in the nook of several forested mountains that seemed to separate it from the surrounding areas. Outside, old-fashioned Japanese style houses crowded together in close proximity nearer to the mountainsides, tied together with winding one-lane roads. Rice fields filled the flat basin, and one could be forgiven for thinking they had stepped into a remote mountain farming village, as opposed to being a 15-minute drive from the bustling Kawanakajima shopping district and 6-lane roads of the prefectural capital, Nagano City.
When I met him, Mr. Kubo cut an unassuming figure as he came to greet my guests and me. An older man, in his late fifties or early sixties, Mr. Kubo seemed unaffected by the hot weather even as he wore the distinctive mushroom grower's outfit: a white full-body suit with a white hood fastened over the ears. We started out by first taking a brief walk-through Shinshu Mushroom Workshop’s old factory, where the farm grows shimeji (beech) mushrooms only.

Mr. Kubo told me a bit about the family business and its history. I was especially surprised to find out he is the third-generation owner. The Kubo family are, according to some sources, the first farmers in Japan to cultivate enoki year-round using climate-controlled systems. Mr. Kubo said his grandfather started in the mushroom business in the early post-war years, and that they tore down the original facility in the early Eighties to build a new plant specifically for shimeji. Even back in the 1980s the Kubo family found enoki were proving less and less profitable, and right at that time, the Takarazo Brewing Company’s exclusive rights to shimeji mushrooms expired, allowing many others to jump into the shimeji business in short succession.

Even without being told, I could guess that most of the equipment in the old factory dated back to that expansion or the following years. Probably the most impressive aspect of my trips to Japanese farms is seeing rusty, well-worn equipment that nonetheless is still running after 30 or 40 years of continuous use. With a little occasional maintenance and proper use, Japanese mushroom farming equipment is tougher than an old Nokia brick cellphone.

The original facility had a number of interesting and unique elements. The necessity of building the farm on a small segment of land on steep and uneven terrain led to constructing two separate buildings, an ultimately inefficient layout as Mr. Kubo himself acknowledged. After filling and inoculating bottles of substrate on the ground level, they have to be transported to the second floor of the neighboring building for inoculation and pinning. Then the bottles go back to the first floor for fruiting and harvesting, before returning again to the second floor for packaging.

The most interesting aspect of the original farm had to be the shelving of the fruiting rooms. The fruiting room shelves were welded into the support pillars and formed part of the building structure itself. Mr. Kubo visibly sighed as he explained that because of that design choice, they cannot clean or replace the shelving_emdash_not without temporarily shuttering production and gutting the fruiting rooms. This might also require reinforcing the structure elsewhere. As a result, small sprigs of grass and other bright green, tiny plants grow where bits of fallen substrate have built over time on the corroded shelves, taking advantage of condensation and bright LED lights to grow.

Rather than finding it dirty, I felt like I’d stepped into a quasi-natural space. There is of course, no real harm to the mushrooms nor does it impact humans. The mushrooms themselves don’t come into contact with the shelving anyway, and their natural environment is on the forest floor surrounded by dirt, other plants, and insects. But I understood clearly why the business had bought a separate facility on a flatter plot of land five minutes’ drive away. Rather than trying to expand further or work around a steep slope, better to just build in an easier location.

The new location did not look twenty years old. Well-maintained, clean, and all in one compact facility, I could see how Mr. Kubo applied various lessons from the family’s old set-up. Shinshu Mushroom Workshop grows Lion’s Mane only at this facility, along with shimeji. The farm uses the same bottle size for both the shimeji and lion’s mane, though the substrate is different. Both varieties are incubated in the same room, separated by a floor-to-ceiling plastic tarp and with different settings on the air conditioning units for the different sections, with shimeji incubating at 21-22 degrees Celsius and lion’s mane at 23 degrees, plus or minus one degree.
I arrived just in time to see a worker start harvesting lion’s mane. A veteran at the farm harvested each bottle by hand, employing an airy wrist flick to separate the lion’s mane with a small portion of substrate evenly attached. The harvester cleanly separately each fruiting body from the bottle without damage. The same worker could tell the weight of each cluster immediately, stripping off little pieces of some lion’s mane mushrooms and tossing them in a bin to be dried, and placing others as is in the plastic carton. Each carton was then sealed by a packaging machine, though while we were there the worker was still calibrating the finnicky machine.

Each pack of lion’s mane weighs precisely between 100~120 grams. Mr. Kubo's prices vary from season to season, but the whole prices are a modest 65~95 yen per pack. Lion’s mane mushrooms use a different substrate than shimeji, and Mr. Kubo estimated that the beech sawdust used as a primary substrate cost a little over twice as much as their shimeji substrate. I brought up the point though, that the company was harvesting lion’s mane within 29~32 days of inoculation to packaging versus at least three months for shimeji, and that overall, lion’s mane required less handling. Even so, Mr. Kubo told me the lion’s mane are more than twice as expensive to produce_emdash_I hadn’t taken into account that the company is getting 200~220 grams of shimeji per bottle, while the same 800cc bottle only yields 100~120 grams of lion’s mane. Thus, at the end of the day, Shinshu Mushroom Workshop gets only a slightly higher profit margin growing lion’s mane than growing shimeji.

Most of the process for growing lion’s mane with the farm’s bottle cultivation system is specially patented and by request will not be revealed in this journal. I can say that many of the most distinctive aspects of the cultivation method are geared towards getting the extremely consistent, pearly white coloration and fluffy, coral structure in the lion’s mane mushrooms. As always, both the Japanese consumer market and the production market are very image conscious and place an extremely high value on consistency.

One very interesting point that Mr. Kubo gave me permission to publish was that the farm does fungal scraping, (a specific and necessary process of bottle cultivation systems), at just the 10-day mark. This is before the lion’s mane has even fully cultivated the substrate. The reason was that the company found lion’s mane will begin fruiting aggressively even before the substrate is fully colonized. A fruiting body will form inside the capped bottles, still stacked in the incubation room. Mr. Kubo even described how the force of lion’s mane mushrooms growing within the bottles had toppled an entire stack of lion’s mane bottles in the incubation room, and in other cases broken the caps on the bottle. After fungal scraping, the remaining incubation, pinning, and finally, fruiting all occur in the same room.

Lion’s mane does not seem like a mushroom viable for bottle cultivation systems, so I found it interesting to have my preconceived notions challenged at Shinshu Mushroom Workshop. I could see at once the pros and cons of the system after Mr. Kubo’s tour. The bottle system allows the farm to produce a lot of mushrooms with very little labor_emdash_indeed it is not production capacity but rather the limited demand for lion’s mane mushrooms in Japan that limits the farm’s production. The use of the bottle system also lets the farm get highly consistent sized lion’s mane mushrooms ideal for single-pack sales of the sort that dominate supermarkets and are more manageable for most consumers (buying a 1kg hunk of lion’s mane is quite a commitment that many casual consumers won’t be willing to make, especially considering generally high food prices across the board). As Mr. Kubo noted, lion’s mane mushrooms already have a short shelf life, and any added handling, including cutting for packaging damages the mushroom and decreases shelf life further in addition to the added labor costs.
The cons, in comparison, seem trite. A lower bioefficiency. And that’s about it. The quality I saw at Mr. Kubo’s farm was, if anything, more standardized and higher than a lot of pictures of lion’s mane I see harvested on bag cultivation farms in North America and Europe. Due to the efficiency of bottle cultivation systems in reducing labor costs and streamlining the cultivation process, as well as their compactness, I would estimate the total loss in efficiency is quite small. Substrate itself is the cheapest part of the mushroom farming process for exotic mushrooms, making the trade off in bioefficiency a small one.

If anything, I was actually most surprised to see that Shinshu Mushroom Workshop insisted on using very expensive beech sawdust as the base for their lion’s mane production. Lion’s mane is not quite at the level of oyster mushrooms in growing like wild on anything and everything organic-based, but I have read numerous experiments finding lion’s mane grows well on spent substrate from other mushrooms, and grows on a wide variety of both hardwood and softwood sawdust. From the study published in the second trial issue of the Japanese Exotic Mushroom Journal in 2022, the author found fruiting body yield actually increased as the percentage of spent maitake substrate used in the lion’s mane substrate increased.

I mentioned to Mr. Kubo that I felt like he could make use of at least a 50/50 mix in the lion’s mane substrate, using 50% spent shimeji substrate (for which his farm is one of the few in Japan that still use a sawdust substrate rather than ground corncob). This would be my recommendation for a bottle cultivation lion’s mane facility outside of Japan; to use a composite substrate in order to recycle one portion of the substrate used growing other varieties of mushroom and thus partially off-set the main drawback of bottle cultivation systems, (the lower bioefficiency).

The visit to Shinshu Mushroom Workshop was a very productive day for me. Not often do I get a chance to hear about the changes in the industry from one of the oldest-established bottle cultivation farms in Japan. The success and consistency that Mr. Kubo has built up with lion’s mane, showcases the extraordinary versatility of bottle cultivation systems. Given the long-term market pressures of high labor costs, labor shortages and the export of cheap mushrooms from major producers like China, any mushroom that can be cultivated with bottle systems will be.

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Meet the Growers

Shinshu Mushroom Workshop