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Looking at Nagasaki’s Most Storied Mushroom Farm
Unzen Kinoko Honpo
I like to try to retain the original Japanese names for many of the companies and growers I highlight in our magazine. Sometimes, as in this case, the effect can create a long name that is challenging for English speakers. But despite the length, Unzen Kinoko Honpo is a simple name. Unzen is the name of the highest peak in the interior of the Shimabara Peninsula where the company is based. Kinoko, as many in the mushroom business may already know, simply means mushroom in Japanese, while honpo has a meaning similar to headquarters. So in English, the name is simply Unzen Mushroom Headquarters, or Unzen Mushroom Depot or something along those lines, but I think the Japanese name has a better ring to it.

The Unzen area was, along with the Seto Inland Sea and the Kirishima Highlands, the first National Park designated in Japan in 1934. To this day, the area along the coast of Shimabara City has many hotels and is a popular tourist spot for both domestic and foreign tourists, and also attracts a great deal of sports and sports training events (as I discovered the hard way when I went to visit Unzen Kinoko Honpo, and held off until two weeks before confirming a hotel, only to discover a massive hotel had no open singles available on a Wednesday in the off-season because of college sports clubs having a training event).

The name Unzen may be familiar to some people as the volcano where volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft died in an unexpectedly ferocious pyroclastic flow, along with 41 other scientists and journalists on June 3, 1991. The story of the eruption and their deaths has been made into a Werner Herzog documentary, and most recently, the Academy Award nominated documentary Fire of Love (2022). I had the story of the eruption in my mind as I drove through that beautiful volcanic range to my hotel in Shimabara City, a beautiful and idyllic town, half seaside resort, half old-fashioned farming town.
Arriving at Unzen Kinoko Honpo
Unzen Kinoko Honpo is a fairly big company for a regional mushroom producer. The company has 207 employees, of which, importantly, 136 are full-time tenured employees. They have 13 mushroom-growing facilities, a mushroom-themed store and restaurant, and a shop in Nagasaki Station in Nagasaki City. The most unique trait of this company, and the biggest source of my interest in visiting them, was that Unzen Kinoko Honpo is essentially the only large mushroom grower I know of in Japan (as in growers who grow more than 300 tons a year), that grows in excess of two varieties other than Hokto.

Unzen Kinoko Honpo is certainly the only grower I’ve ever encountered using both bag and bottle systems simultaneously (at different facilities), and grows enoki, eryngii, shimeji, nameko, shiitake, and maitake: a diverse portfolio that wouldn’t look out of place on any large exotic mushroom farm in North America or Europe. What I came looking for, from across the country, was the story of how such an unusual system came about in Japan, where the law of the land is that the bigger you are the more you focus on one, maybe two varieties (unless you are Hokuto, Japan’s largest and most ambitious mushroom producer). Certainly, Unzen Kinoko Honpo was also the only company I knew of running its own processed foods division.

Plenty of farms in Japan do sell their own processed foods using their own mushrooms, of course. I have written about it numerous times. But Unzen Kinoko Honpo does this in-house; the company has a food-processing and manufacturing division. This, on top of the diverse growing portfolio, made Unzen Kinoko Honpo such a complete company, that they piqued my interest the moment I read of them in a Japanese-language magazine for mushroom enthusiasts in its Summer Issue of 2021. All the more so because they were based on the end of an isolated and rural peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture on the southwestern side of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four major islands.

Kyushu isn’t a big mushroom consuming area traditionally. The only mushroom industry there historically was log-based (actual trees, not artificial logs) shiitake, and the Shimabara Peninsula is far away from the major population centers. Why had such a large and exceptional company, with so many different divisions and such a scale come to be in such an area? How had it come about? That was the history I was interested in hearing as I met with them and took an opportunity to look at some of their facilities and cultivation practices.

To my great honor, I was able to meet with the CEO and 2nd Generation owner, Kusuda Yoshikuma in person and talk about the company’s history. I already knew, from the article I had read, that Mr. Kusuda’s father initially founded the company in 1957. Mr. Kusuda’s father took inspiration from a mountain in the area called Mt. Naba, naba being a colloquial word for mushroom in Western dialects of Japan. Mt. Naba, despite its name, only produced a small amount of wild mushrooms, but for that was thought of very fondly in the surrounding areas.

Around that time was right when the development of the artificial cultivation of enoki with bottles was becoming practical and there was a lot of push to grow enoki. This originated and focused mostly in northern Nagano Prefecture (not far from our office), but through some chance connections, Mr. Kusuda’s father also began growing enoki. Enoki, however, are not widely found in Kyushu in the mountains, and they did not feature in the cooking of the region, which traditionally used shiitake. Therefore, from the start, the focus was on selling to hotels looking for interesting and high-class, unique local ingredients for use in hotel meals, and in selling to tourists at souvenir shops and the like.

The answer to my question about how they came to be a food processing company on top of producing mushrooms came unexpectedly early in the story. Unzen Kinoko Honpo is in a warm, humid region with long hot summers. This is not the typical climate of regions that have created large-scale mushroom farming. The logistics in the late 1950s and 1960s, when most people in the region did not yet have refrigerators, was even more challenging. By the early 1960s, the company was already pickling enoki in a sweet vinegar brine and selling jars of enoki pickles as souvenirs. The company still has one such jar from 1965 on display. Very early on, the company was investing in food processing by necessity because of the small market and climate.

Mr. Kusuda himself, now CEO of a big company, began at the age of 20, and when he started there, work consisted of himself, his father, and 6 employees whose workload varied by season. It was impressive to see how, in a single generation, a small family farm has gone from that humble beginning to a vast enterprise that is among the biggest in the Japanese mushroom business. However, Mr. Kusuda remained a humble man, approachable, conversational, and also a gracious host who spent his entire morning talking to us. He would explain concepts carefully, while scribbling notes, pictures, diagrams and other references on a tablet, which made it easy to keep up with the freewheeling conversation given that Japanese is my second language.
A company takes its cues from the top. I’ve heard that several times, but with Unzen Kinoko Honpo I experienced this intimately. Mr. Kusuda set the tone, and everyone we worked with and interacted with was gracious and patient. Most importantly, Mr. Kusuda takes pride in his local area and also has made it his motto to help develop the region. He has a deep sense of social obligation, and also an understanding of the economic issues underwriting the impoverishment and depopulation of Japan’s rural and secondary regions.

While most big producers run on a skeleton crew of tenured employees, who are more expensive because they get pensions, supplemented health insurance and are entitled to full-time hours year-round, and then supplement the rest of the work with seasonally fluctuating loads of part-timers and guestworkers (typically Vietnamese), Mr. Kusuda made it his goal to offer full tenured employment to as many people as possible. This was more expensive for the company, but he wanted to create as many stable, good jobs for local people as possible, as a common issue in rural areas is the low profitability of small-scale farming, followed by the limited availability of full-time tenured work. This leads to a negative cycle of people leaving for work, the local economy shrinking, and available jobs further drying up. As such the company has only 19 foreign guestworkers, and has focused on local development whereever feasible.

This philosophy was one half of the reason why the company cultivates so many different varieties. I mentioned to Mr. Kusuda that having a varied portfolio also insulates the company from shocks in price and demand in any one kind of mushroom and gives them unique strengths for selling B2B as they can provide a full-range of mushrooms with one contract (saving companies the effort of piecemeal contracting five different companies to fill their supply needs). He admitted that there were some benefits to growing many varieties, even as the management issues increased dramatically, but he told me his primary motivation lay elsewhere.
Mr. Kusuda recounted a story of how he used to tell people, with pride, that he was a mushroom farmer. Then, once, a person asked him what he grew, and he realized that all he could answer with was “Enoki.” That prompted a bit of an identity crisis, and he began thinking on how he was going about the business critically. Cattle ranchers often have several different breeds and hybrids; they may have Jersey cows and Holstein cows. Tomato farmers grow several different varieties. Other vegetable farmers grow several different vegetables according to the traits of their land (variations in sunlight, soil drainage, etc.). Mr. Kusuda then questioned himself: was he really a mushroom farmer or an enoki farmer?

That question coincided with the need to provide work for more and more contracted, tenured employees, and thus the company began expanding into producing other mushrooms. This expansion also enabled them to further develop the area. In Japan, the greatest rule of business etiquette, no, not etiquette, but a sort of guiding moral philosophy, is that if your employees and surrounding area don’t benefit from what you are doing, then you aren’t doing good business. Especially in rural Japan and the secondary cities this socially-minded way of doing business emphasizes ensuring that you profit, that your suppliers profit, that your distributors profit_emdash_that everyone has to have long-term benefits to doing business with you or you won’t succeed in doing business for long.
This socially conscious minded way of doing business was also the answer for why the company produces instant noodles. The Shimabara Peninsula was traditionally a big center for producing thin, delicate wheat noodles called somen, but demand has been falling long-term. Companies were also struggling with seasonal demand, as somen is most popular in the summer, since the noodles are often eaten chilled with a cold broth (the opposite seasonal slump as mushrooms). Therefore Mr. Kusuda aimed to support local somen manufacturers by using their noodles to produce a processed food that could reach new markets.
Instant ramen, of the sort that is now ubiquitous almost anywhere in the world, is made by frying the noodles in oil to remove the water content. Mr. Kusuda wanted to preserve the delicate texture and mild taste of traditional somen, while making a product that could be healthier and lower in calories and salt than typical instant ramen, so the company used a cold-drying method to dry noodles, taking inspiration from a traditional food preservation system in Nagano Prefecture. Their line of instant noodles makes use of different dried and stewed mushrooms from their own production, and are the latest in a number of different food products the company manufactures.

The Shimabara Peninsula also produces a great deal of organic cherry tomatoes that are famous for their sweetness and flavor (the warm, seaside climate and volcanic soil are in many ways similar to the area around Naples), so Mr. Kusuda talked about his next project of using local tomatoes and his own mushrooms to produce jarred organic pasta sauces. Even at an age when many successful businessmen are retired and enjoying golf, Mr. Kusuda is still deeply invested in the company and the community, still searching for new ways to integrate different local specialties and provide economic stimulus and stability to the struggling region.

The company specializes in organic certified products, starting with its own mushrooms and continuing with all of its ingredients. The motto of Unzen Kinoko Honpo is Beautiful Food, Healthy Lives. I was struck by the forward-thinking mindset and get-it-done attitude shared by Mr. Kusuda and other members of the company. The diverse business projects the company has gotten up and running serve as evidence to those strengths. Mr. Kusuda was also the first person I’ve ever met in the Japanese mushroom industry who didn’t complain to me about low prices or talk about the struggles of the industry in recent years. I enjoyed Mr. Kusuda’s positive attitude; a sort of ‘if you approach the issue systematically, you’ll always find opportunities’ attitude.

A look at some of the cultivation centers
As I mentioned before, Unzen Kinoko Honpo has 13 different mushroom growing facilities spread across a lumpy-shaped mountainous peninsula where it can sometimes take forty minutes to drive around a valley in order to reach a place that you started out just a few miles away from. We had a limited schedule and other companies to visit, so we were only able to drop by two of the production facilities, one focused on enoki, and the other maitake. I was very excited to get to see the same company’s facilities for both a bottle cultivation facility and a bag cultivation facility all on the same day. We started with the enoki farm.

Enoki is a winter mushroom, which makes it particularly energy intensive to cultivate in a climate that is warm and hot most of the year. Enoki sells at lower prices than white button mushrooms for a reason_emdash_Unzen Kinoko Honpo, like nearly all producers in Japan, uses an imported ground corn cob substrate as the base. This is extremely cheap, with the main costs being shipping fees. Then they use nutritional supplements made from other regional agro-waste streams, which in Japan are typically wheat bran and rice bran, with dried soybean pulp from tofu production also standard in enoki substrate..

Enoki production on a unit-by-unit basis is extremely automated, and I saw that at work at Unzen Kinoko Honpo. Packaging takes up most of the labor, as with every other enoki farm I have been to, as it requires a lot of people to cut and weigh out enoki. This is especially true in Kyushu, which unlike in Nagano, where enoki is often sold in whole clusters of 180~270 grams, convention and consumer demands require enoki to be sold in supermarkets in 100-gram clusters. Therefore while, aside from a few people working to remove the collars from the cultivation bottles, the harvest itself is automated, dividing up and weighing enoki on the packaging line is labor intensive compared to the rest of the processes at enoki farm.
Elsewhere, the use of fully automated machines, many of which only require a single person to oversee the work station, forklifts, and other specialized equipment makes enoki production one of the most highly efficient year-round agricultural products I have encountered. Enoki itself has a fast cycle, and given the very narrow margins most producers in Japan run very similar systems with few exceptions. The incubation time is short, ranging from 30 to as few as 21 days. A full cycle for enoki farms takes 45~50 days.

Unzen Kinoko Honpo ran its enoki facility on fairly standard settings. I noticed that most of the temperature settings tended to be at the upper ranges, which makes sense given high energy costs. Incubation in Japan runs between 14~17 degrees Celsius with around 70% humidity. The initial pinning occurs with a similar temperature range, but farms typically raise the humidity to over 95%, which means the room is practically a mist and I had to shield the lens of my camera as we moved through the pinning room.

The suppression room (a literal translation of the Japanese term, which I have seen written elsewhere in English as the suppression step), is part of the enoki cultivation process where farms throttle the temperature to between 3~5 degrees Celsius. There are different reasons for this step, including that by suppressing excess growth, growth of the entire batch as a whole tends to even out giving a nice consistent starting point for the fruiting phase. The suppression step involves a lot of careful settings, including light and carbon dioxide levels, and is very important to both yield and product quality.

The last stage, the fruiting, is done in a room between 5~8 degrees Celsius (generally at the higher end of that spectrum in Japan), with humidity levels between 70~80%. I walked through the entire process, noting that production was beginning to taper off, as all the rooms weren’t running to capacity. By the time summer comes along, I expect their facilities to be even more empty, as Japan’s enoki growers all have to reduce production in summer because the lack of demand and prices are so low and facility costs are so high.

The most interesting addition I saw that I hadn’t seen at an enoki farm before was a lift that sank into the floor, allowing easy access to each level of a 5-tier shelf (placed atop the lift by forklift) during the harvesting process, where workers first removed the collars off the bottles. I’d seen other systems before, including some that were more complex, but this one struck me as an elegantly simple way to streamline and speed up the process in a labor-efficient manner, without as much specialized equipment as total automation.

The Maitake Farm
After touring the enoki farm, we drove a few minutes away to see Unzen Kinoko Honpo’s maitake farm. The bag filling for the day was almost complete, so we watched the characteristic last sputters of production, where workers work to knock as much loose or clumped sawdust as possible and clear out the system, in the process filling another two or three bags at the end while beginning to clean the machines. The maitake farmed used standard M-sized bags, around 2.5~2.7 kg in weight, using clear PP plastic and sawdust from deciduous trees.

We moved through the maitake farm quite quickly. I was less struck by any peculiar settings as by the incubation cycle. Unzen Kinoko Honpo incubates maitake blocks for 40~42 days and then harvests within 50~52 days. Compare this to the typical maitake cycle of 60~70 days at most other farms. Often, when you push the incubation and fruiting cycle speed up, you lose out on yield and quality_emdash_there’s usually a trade off somewhere. However, I carefully reviewed Unzen Kinoko Honpo’s fruiting rooms and the farm was getting an excellent sized maitake fruiting body on each block with great consistency.

The quality was also quite good, with a light, creamy coloration and full, firm, leaf-like brackets. A quick step into the packaging room also delivered the same vibrant, intense aroma of maitake that I am familiar with. The average fruiting body size might have been a touch smaller than typical, but I found the quality and consistency was if anything higher. The incubation and fruiting room were on the warmer end of the scale for maitake, which probably speeds things up a bit, and the exact mixture of nutrition supplements can also help speed up the growing cycle too. However, the biggest factor probably comes down to spawn variety and spawn management, and in that department, Japan is unmatched for the sheer quality and number of options to choose from. Most large companies here make their own spawn anyway, and have in-house spawn research centers and patented spawn that no one else is allowed to use, giving them branded and unique edges to their product.
Kumo ka Yama ka _endash_ An In-House Restaurant
Unzen Kinoko Honpo even has its own restaurant. For now, the restaurant is confined to one shop beside the company’s nameko farm, but I hope to see them open up additional franchises in the future. Our hosts generously treated us to a free lunch at the restaurant, which was about 45 minutes removed from the headquarters, on the other side of the mountains, midway to the next stop in our itinerary.

The building is quite charming and fashionable, with a waterwheel and small circulating stream in front of an octagonal-shaped two-story dining area and attached shop front. Inside, the entrance area is taken up by a spacious shop selling both the company’s own mushrooms and mushroom-based food products, but also a number of local products such as Japanese-grown coffee and other souvenirs of Nagasaki Prefecture.

To the left of the entrance there is even a cave-like room, chilled and filled with mist, where people can walk through and harvest their own fresh mushrooms at low prices. In fact, while we were taking pictures of the mushroom harvesting hall, an order for a full array of nameko, eryngii, maitake and enoki came in, and one of the staff members came in and harvested everything to package up for the customer.

I found the dining area both very interesting visually and a pleasant setting to eat out. The tables are set against the outer wall, near the windows and natural light (that day the weather was beautiful spring weather, with clear blue skies), while a broad spiral staircase to the second floor occupies the center. The light veneer of the wooden floors and the white walls and columns made the atmosphere very bright and clean feeling. I was very impressed with how a mushroom-growing company had taken such great care that even its restaurant was so well-designed.

The food, of course, is the main concern. Especially after a busy morning of long Japanese conversations, lining up photography shots in bad lighting, and driving. I have to say, as an amateur chef I am also something of a foodie, so it’s rare for something to really blow me away, and yet I think the course I had at Kumo ka Yama ka was the best of any place I ate while on the island of Kyushu and one of the best I have had in a while.

Precision. Consideration. Care. Those are the best descriptors of each dish we had. From mixed blocks of tempura called kakeage, where the eryngii was finely diced and mixed with maitake, enoki, carrot and several other vegetables and lightly battered and fried to a perfect crispy-but-not-brittle degree: everything was flawless. To be personal and direct, I am usually excellent, to an irritating degree, at picking out some little thing that was off or that could have been done better when I go out to eat, but here I could make no comment.
Our rice was a takikomi set, where mushrooms, vegetables and seasoning (mainly soy sauce and mirin) have been cooked into the rice together, and it was also great. Not too salty or sweet, with the umami flavor profiles of the mushrooms clearly highlighted, and maintaining a light airiness like plain white rice, even though takikomi rice bowls often feel too heavy or filling.

The star of the set was the noodles, using Nagasaki somen. I like ramen, but the hot bowl of Nagasaki somen I had at Kumo ka Yama ka, of which there are three types, each modeled after the instant noodles the company sells, had an entirely different charm. Ramen is a nice junk food, a rather heavy, salty, and, let’s be honest, unhealthy splurge. I don’t think I could eat ramen everyday even if I wanted to, but Unzen Kinoko Honpo’s somen was different. Not only was it delicious, the noodles as fine as vermicelli, delicate and with just the right degree of chew, but the broth wasn’t greasy at all, and had a clean, light, but very flavorful taste even as it wasn’t especially salty either.

I didn’t even intend, beforehand, to write about the restaurant other than as a one-paragraph aside. But the entire concept, from the presentation to execution, wowed me. I thought the entire set-up was a really good illustration of how the entire company does business and a good example of why the company has been successful. Because if you can go from farming mushrooms to making instant noodles to opening up a restaurant this good (and our food also took less than 10 minutes to come out), you’ve got business management down to an art form.

The pictures of the meal you see, while we received it complimentary from our hosts as yet another bit of lovely hospitality, cost only around 1000 yen for the entire set, which is less than 7USD. The entire lunch was very healthy and well balanced, with a lot of mushrooms (shiitake, eryngii, enoki and maitake), vegetables, excellent noodles and rice, while costing less than a typical meal at McDonalds_emdash_in Japan, to say nothing of the U.S. where McDonalds is even more expensive. Beautiful Foods, Healthy Lives indeed. This was an example of a healthy, organic meal made with fresh whole foods, not a ton of processing, and yet simple to produce at scale and affordable for anyone.
Conclusions
Unzen Kinoko Honpo’s restaurant stuck with me. Not only was the food that good, but the concept was far and above what I was expecting. As an American, my home country is often an immediate contrast for experiences, however outdated my sense of “America” is at this point. I found it difficult to imagine any American company or businessman approaching business like Unzen Kinoko Honpo. The entire emphasis was on minimizing costs, providing affordable organic foods that were as healthy as possible and maintaining high standards while not charging unholy premiums for said quality.

A company that has grown largely because of the owner’s desire to employee more locals and provide stable employment and economic development for his community, and a stark commitment to using local products in processed foods while being unrelenting on quality and presentation. My stepdaughter and wife both tried a pack of Unzen Kinoko Honpo’s instant noodles and were blown away, saying it was among the best they’d ever had but very light and flavorful. They didn’t even have to boil it like typical instant noodle blocks, but, more like unhealthy instant cup noodle packs, all it takes is hot water and a few minutes to make a quick meal.

The visit and interview confirmed my idea that if you can do things well and consistent, you can do good business over the long-term. Mr. Kusuda hasn’t shied away from making big investments in the right places and the right kinds of facilities all the while, at a smaller scale than most of the other giant conglomerates that operate in the sector, creating a self-contained business that is horizontally integrated between both its different product lines and its regional communities.
I really enjoyed talking for hours with a CEO who was less concerned with massive profits and more concerned with how healthy his products were, with keeping them as affordable as possible, and with ensuring everything was organic. A company that was more concerned with helping other local vendors than with trying to mass-produce its own product using whatever the cheapest imported input was available. Unzen Kinoko Honpo has succeeded doing all of this without being a gourmet luxury product. I loved the company as an example of what a mature and well-oiled mushroom industry can do, even in regions without an ideal climate for this kind of farming, and with a limited local labor pool. I hope to see the next Unzen Kin

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Looking at Nagasaki’s Most Storied Mushroom Farm

Unzen Kinoko Honpo