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10 Jon Pitt: Becoming botanical
107 Plays5 months ago
Translator, author and academic Dr Jon Pitt discusses his work in critical plant studies and the representation of plants throughout Japanese literature and media. He shares the joys of his recent translation of the work Tree Spirits Grass Spirits by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito, and delves into what we can gain from becoming botanical – or thinking like a plant.
Bio:
Jon L Pitt is Assistant Professor of Japanese Environmental Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He situates his work at the intersection of Japanese literary and media studies and critical plant studies. He is the translator of poet Hiromi Ito's Tree Spirits Grass Spirits (Nightboat Books, 2013). His first monograph is forthcoming from Cornell University Press. Selected publications include "Documenting Wordless Testimony: Botanical Witnesses of Hiroshima and Chernobyl" in the journal Angelaki, "Becoming Marimo: The Curious Case of a Charismatic Algae and Imagined Indigeneity" in the collected volume Being Algae: Transformations in Water, Plants (Brill, 2024), and "Of Miracles and Mourning: Reading COVID-19 Environmentally in Uchidate Makiko and Ito Seiko" in The Coronavirus Pandemic in Japanese Literature and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2023).
Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur.
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgment
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm Katherine Poults and this is Plant Kingdom. I'm recording in beautiful Sydney on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay respect to their elders past, present, and future.
Overview of Plant Kingdom Series
00:00:24
Speaker
Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about plants, nature, and environment featuring scientists, artists, researchers, and writers. We release two conversations each month and hear from people who have an intimacy with plants and nature. We discuss their work, stories, and reflections from the field.
Conversation with Dr. John Pitt
00:00:43
Speaker
Today's conversation is with Dr. John Pitt. Our conversation follows a few conceptual threads. We spoke about trees, trees as monuments, trees as witnesses, trees as connecting to the past and future.
00:00:57
Speaker
We spoke about critical plant studies, John's recent translation of the work Tree Spirits, Grass Spirits by acclaimed Japanese poet, Hiromi Ito, and also what we can gain from becoming botanical or thinking like a plant. John is an educator, translator, and assistant professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His research examines the intersections of Japanese literature and media with the environmental sciences. Here's our conversation.
Understanding Critical Plant Studies
00:01:39
Speaker
Thank you so much, John, for chatting today. And we have quite a few questions to talk about bridging a lot of your work in the research area that you're involved in, and of course, your new translation of tree spirits and grass spirits. First, I'd love to just get an overview about the academic and research area that you're involved in. I'm not too familiar with this field. So I'd love if you could just tell us a little bit about what Critical Plant Studies is. First, let me just thank you for ah inviting me on here. It's it's ah it's a great podcast. i'm I'm really thrilled to be a part of it. So ah Critical Plant Studies, you may also hear it being called by another name, which is the Plant Humanities. um I feel like people sort of use those terms interchangeably. I don't think there's a lot of difference between the two. On the one hand, I think the notion of Plant Humanities does a really nice job of
00:02:37
Speaker
sort of expressing the idea that ultimately what this field is, is it's taking the methodologies, you know, the the sort of traditional approaches ah of the humanities and allowing those methodologies to help us think about plants, right? What I like about the idea of critical plant studies though is that it makes it clear this is a field that is engaging with critical theory, right? And so somewhere between those two terms. I sort of use them interchangeably. um But I think, you know, critical plant studies is a nice term, like I said, because of its acknowledgement of critical theory. And so plants in critical plant studies becomes this interesting way of adding to those conversations.
Plants as Metaphors
00:03:22
Speaker
Plants become another actor that that allows us to, ah you know, rethink some of those those presuppositions and those sort of biases that that we might have.
00:03:34
Speaker
And so on the one hand, there's, ah you know, I think when I talk to people about critical plant studies, I think a lot of people can sort of get their mind around thinking with plants in a metaphorical sense, right? ah Notions of of ethnicity and homeland, right? And, and, migrantancy and, and, and, and, and, But the thing I really like about critical plant studies, and I think this is a really important element to the field, um is it's also very much engaged with with science to a certain degree, right? And the actual biology, the material um qualities of of plants themselves, right? So it's not just at a sort of textual metaphorical level.
00:04:20
Speaker
There's a lot to say within critical plant studies about the plants themselves. For me, it's sort of an outgrowth of the Greater Environmental Humanities Project. right It's interdisciplinary. um In many ways, it grows out of animal studies, which is a bit more of an established field as well within the humanities. So that's sort of of ah a long answer. The short answer is a bit more like, you know, it's it's folks in the humanities trying to be interdisciplinary in their work to think about plants more seriously, both in terms of textual representation, but also in in history and very material um interactions and co-productions that humans share with plants and in in the real material world.
00:05:08
Speaker
Thank you. And I guess it's such a ah broad field. The ways that we think about connect to plants, how they represent culture in life is is so broad, isn't it?
Cultural Significance of Plants
00:05:20
Speaker
And it's kind of, in a way, invisible to us because it's so ubiquitous too. We'll touch upon that, I think, plants as a vehicle to have other conversations about other parts of our life and our our world are so interesting. And I don't know, maybe it's it's not surprising, but it's A lot of people don't necessarily have predisposed strong opinions about plants in their life, and I guess that's the power of plants sometimes, isn't it?
00:05:51
Speaker
That's true. And, you know, I think people probably do have stronger bit opinions about plants than they even realize. um Some of those are aesthetic, obviously, right? We all, well, not all of us, but there are people who garden because they like the way certain plants look. we obviously consume a lot of plants right in our diets. So so yeah, i mean it's the kind of thing where plants, as you said, are are so ubiquitous and can very easily just sort of fall out of our everyday consciousness. But I think that's another real goal of critical plant studies is just to
00:06:30
Speaker
really push us to to be more cognizant and aware of how thoroughly entangled so much of our everyday life, you know, even just down to breathing in and breathing out, right? I mean, this is a this is a relationship, right? It's a relationship that we share with plant life. um So what if what if we did take that very seriously? And I guess how how did plants enter your life or your academic life and and work? When did your interest turn to plants or were they always there?
00:07:03
Speaker
Yeah, so so kind of going back to that last question, like you know plants have always been a part of my life you know growing up without even really being aware. like I think about places I've lived in terms of the plant life. right And so I have these deep sort of emotional resonances with with landscapes and and certain plants. um But as far as something of an academic object, like research object, we want to call it that, that did come a bit later. I should say, I don't even think we've mentioned this yet, right? So a critical plant studies is sort of half of where I situate my
John's Research on Japan
00:07:40
Speaker
work. Like I imagine one of my feet sort of on that pillar. And then the other one is ah in the realm of Japan studies, right? And so so i I research and teach and write about Japan and Japanese literature and cinema and sort of media texts more broadly.
00:07:57
Speaker
and So I entered graduate school, a PhD program, knowing I wanted to continue learning about Japan and Japanese literature and cinema. And at the time when I entered graduate school, i was the sort of idea for what I wanted to write a dissertation about was more about the supernatural. and the sort of way that the supernatural still manifests in Japanese literature and cinema in interesting ways, and in particular like in urban space. you know I came into graduate school thinking I was going to have a project that was very focused on the city and urban space and technology right and all this stuff.
00:08:36
Speaker
I ended up doing a or participating in a like a fieldwork research trip over the summer, I think after my first year of graduate school, um at UC Berkeley. so I went to Tokyo with the architecture department, actually. you know Like I said, I was interested in city spaces, and so the architecture department had this trip to Japan where you could go and meet architects and do a kind of research project there. And I was paired up with these other graduate students from the architecture department, and they were very interested in wooden architecture. And so I was participating in this group where we learned a lot about wood and the way wood is used in in contemporary Japanese architecture. some of it being religious architecture, some of it being very commercial.
Interview with Kuma Kengo
00:09:24
Speaker
And I had the good fortune of having um face-to-face sort of sit-down interview with Kuma Kengo, who is a very, very famous Japanese architect. He was the one who ultimately designed the Olympic Stadium. And folks may know, like, a big part of that design for the Olympic Stadium was out of wood.
00:09:46
Speaker
But he also has this amazing building in Tokyo, in Harajuku, that neighborhood, that's called Sunny Hills. And it is a shop that sells Taiwanese pineapple cakes. It is this sort of haphazard looking, almost looks just like a pile of of wood just stacked up that uses all of these traditional Japanese like wooden joints and things. And again, I was very interested in the supernatural, in the thinking about wood and architecture. Is there something sort of supernatural going on with with wood as a material? And so I got to ask the architect Kuma Kengo directly, do you think of wood as a architectural material, as having some sort of spiritual or sacred quality to it? And he just kind of looked and he said, yeah, you know, what is a kind of God?
00:10:39
Speaker
And the architecture people i was with were all like shocked like you know this is a commercial building how can you say that but that was sort of the moment where i said okay there's something far more strange and interesting going on with notions of the natural. wood. I don't need to necessarily go into like the supernatural and manifestations of monsters and things like that.
Shift to Plant Analysis
00:11:03
Speaker
If wood in the city can somehow be in the mind of one of Japan's most premier architects, a kind of god, there's a lot to say about trees and wood. And so that's that's sort of what ended up kickstarting the rest of my research for the dissertation was then turning more to plants, thinking more about plants, seeing the way that they popped up in the works I was reading.
00:11:26
Speaker
That's amazing. And we'll talk more about trees, but trees do seem to have special special access to some of these ideas, don't they?
00:11:38
Speaker
They do, and you know trees are... Yeah, when you start thinking about trees in Japan, there's there's just so many different sort of like vectors of ways of thinking about it. So on the one hand, right Japan is, to this day, still a very heavily forested place, which you know you compare that to other industrial nation states throughout the world. right Japan gets lauded as a place that has done a very good job of keeping its forests. and so you You will see environmentalists like praising Japan um for having this almost stereotypical harmonious relationship with its trees and its forests. The thing is, right so many of those forests are plantation forests.
00:12:24
Speaker
and the reason they've been able to grow and thrive if we want to call it thriving is because japan has imported so much lumber right so much raw um timber from southeast asia and so it's not really a sort of ecologically sound story the way people like to think it is. That said, right you do have these long histories of spirituality tied to trees, but you know these trees that are deemed sacred. So there's all kinds of competing, if you want to call them ideologies or or ways of knowing trees in particular, that sort of overlap and brush up against each other in Japan. And so those are the kind of things I love to try to tease out in my research.
Translation of Hiromi Ito's Book
00:13:08
Speaker
Perfect introduction to the work I wanted to to speak with you about, Tree Spirits, Grass Spirits, by translated by you, originally published, I believe, in 2014, written by the poet Hiromi Ito. Can you tell me about this this book? Sure. So this is a book that is a sort of compendium of dories, long-form poems. um And they were written, as you said, sort of in the early aughts, right? When Hiromi um Ito, the the poet, was still living in the United States. And so for several decades Ito lived in Southern California, not very far from where I currently live and and work.
00:13:54
Speaker
which was, you know, I discovered her work before I moved here, but it was just sort of a serendipitous thing that I ended up living sort of close to the area she's writing about. And so she does. She writes quite a bit about Southern California, Northern San Diego County. And this is a book that is the way I kind of like to think of it is she's writing about what plants are like in the u.s. in southern california for a japanese audience and so that's really fascinating right because it again it sort of achieved some of that the familiarization that we were talking about earlier without using that term right but on the one hand it's a work that i think i'm can be very easy to read
00:14:39
Speaker
ah That's one of the things about Hiromi's work is they are very lyrical It kind of there's a there's a energy to them that I think kind of propels you through the text and so you can kind of read through it without necessarily realizing how much thought and sort of philosophical questions are being asked in the process and so it's about plants, but it's it's very much about being an immigrant into the United States and raising children in in a country that you are not all that familiar with and having your own parents in another country and watching them age and having to care for them across the Pacific Ocean. And it's about travel and it's about trying to
00:15:29
Speaker
process one's life and and think about one's life alongside the plants that have been these companions throughout the years. Yeah, everything you've said, I can relate to the experience of reading it. like There is a real joyful connection to plants throughout the the book, and it really celebrates the plants of everyday life is kind of what I was surprised to see like the the daily interactions with plants. Plants, I felt, were kind of represented as quasi family members. They go through life's moments with her. They're the street plants in her own front yard and on the garden, while also they're holders of memory and culture. And they connect her to a place when there's such a longing for the plants of home.
00:16:21
Speaker
and book too. Yeah, there's so many different lenses and and ways that plants are presented in
Translation Experience During Pandemic
00:16:29
Speaker
in the work. And I guess why, why did you want to translate this work for English audiences? This is a big undertaking. Yeah, it is a big undertaking. um I will say that it was an undertaking that I was able to accomplish largely because of the free time. It sounds weird to say that, but the free time that I was afforded um during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:17:02
Speaker
right So I found myself indoors, as as many of us did, and translating this work became a ah real lifeline for me, a way to still be sort of engaged you know and in in language with with the outside world and with plants and the kinds of things that I i didn't have the the same sort of daily interactions that I did pre-pandemic. But you know I was familiar with ah Hidomi's work prior to coming upon this text. Hidomi has a real spectrum of work, right writing in all kinds of different genres. And and while there is a
00:17:39
Speaker
a recognizable voice that runs throughout them. you know She's somebody who's who's writing poetry, modern poetry. She's translating doing like modern translations of traditional classical Japanese folklore. um She's writing works about food, about plants. I really thought it would be um Worthwhile to sort of introduce another aspect of her career to the English reading world right and plants are such an important part of her work um this text Seemed like the one that to me felt the strongest right there are she has other books about plants and they're all great in their own ways and This one, I think because it deals a little bit more directly with the kind of things that you were ah picking up on, right this' this notion of family and sort of kinship of plants, right I felt like there was a bit more of a philosophical pull to it that I thought would be really
00:18:44
Speaker
fascinating to figure out how do I do this in English. right So it was a bit of a challenge for myself as well. I had been writing a chapter about Hidomi's work more broadly ah for the the monograph that I have been working on. And so I found that I was translating, going back to this text a lot, right and translating little bits of it so that I could discuss them in the the academic chapter on Hidomi's work. And I got to a certain point where I said, well, I've i've already translated so much of this in bits and pieces. like I might as well just try and do the whole thing. um But all you know it also gives back to that that idea that
00:19:25
Speaker
Critical Plant Studies, that that world of the plant humanities, there just wasn't a lot of voices from, you know, East Asian writers. And for me, I've made this claim before, like, this is a text that I feel like somebody who really responds to Robin Wall Kimmerer's work confined something, you know, in some ways similar, in some ways very different, right? But it's it's sort of of that spirit in a way to me, you know, that sort of blending of the autobiographical, autoethnography, thinking about plants, thinking about culture and history and literature, like there is something similar there. And so I just sort of had this vision of someday seeing tree spirits, grass spirits sitting alongside braiding sweet grass or something like that.
00:20:15
Speaker
And I think it it offers something different alongside some of those other works. Something I just wanted to say, I love that it's it's not about the utility of plants or that plants are important or the science of plants. And that's just so nice too. It's true, yeah, I mean, yeah Hitomi's not a scientist, but but what I love is she's so interested in scientific names, right? and and But but she because she's not a scientist and she's a poet, right, and she's a writer, like she thinks about the kind of poetics of of ah Latin nomenclature, and but so it is a very different perspective, you're right. Let's talk about names. The naming of plants is something that
00:21:03
Speaker
Yeah, it keeps coming up a lot in conversations that I'm having throughout this book. There's a lot of different naming conventions also. There are the Japanese names, the the scientific Latin names. the family names of plants, the common names, the English common names of plants. And for example, i I was just leaping through it again and the family name is so interesting talking about, she has a whole section talking about Poacy, the grass family, and then she does that.
00:21:35
Speaker
in Japan, it's the rice family. And just, you know, all the information, everything that signifies it means just in that one example. But a lot for you to navigate through many different names of plants. I guess, did you want to just talk a little bit about the significance of names in this work and what your approach to it was and how you got through it? For sure, right? it's It was the most difficult part of the translation was was figuring that out. um Because it's not it's not just that there are yeah all these different possibilities for how to translate a plant's name, right but but that she's very purposefully choosing different ways of referring to plants at different times and thematizing that instability and drawing our attention to things like that, right how yeah the the grass family is actually you know
00:22:33
Speaker
you knowkas though it's the rice family in Japan and trying to think about well why might that be, right? um So it was really just a case-by-case basis and trying to think like, okay, well, how is the point that she's trying to make here best served, right? Do I ah Do I go with the Latin name? um Do I use a transliteration of the Japanese name, which I do quite a bit? And that's also why I'm very thrilled to have worked with Nightboat Books in publishing this because they they really supported that decision to use a lot of transliterated Japanese in a way that is not always um
00:23:17
Speaker
looked upon favorably in translation, right? Because it can be a little alienating to readers, English readers to see so much Japanese, so many Japanese words and names that they don't recognize. But I talk about this a little bit in the translator's introduction in the book, but I kind of wanted that feeling of alienation because in a way it mirrors the story that Hitomi's trying to tell in the text, right? Where she goes to a a nursery and sees an English common name and it makes and it doesn't mean anything to her. right And so I just think it's it's a text that forces us to really think about how
00:24:01
Speaker
Language is such a part of our relationship with plants, and it's arbitrary, right? It's so arbitrary. Even within the realm of science, right, she talks a lot about how different um families were were split up and reconfigured right after the change in APG categorization and how, you know, this thing that we think of as scientific knowledge is not as stable as as we want to believe it is. And so, so yeah, the the translating of the plant names was difficult, but I also feel like that's the real heart of the book, and I'm i'm happy with how it turned out. And another, I guess, topic that comes throughout the book too is this relationship to a representation of invasive plants, non-native plants, what is a weed, kind of the the value of of different plants and kind of the shock of seeing some plants from fromm home, from Japan as weeds in different contexts and vice versa too. And there's so many
00:25:12
Speaker
examples. There's a whole chapter about kudzu, tumbleweeds, ice plants, thistles. There's just a lot of examples of this. Can you speak a little bit about this theme?
00:25:27
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's again, part of the philosophical core of the text, I think, right? So obviously, the conversation around invasive species and the kind of rhetoric right um that that we use to talk about and value certain plants over others. It's a very complicated conversation, right? And and it's definitely ah an important conversation within critical plant studies. You know, I mentioned Robin Wall Kimmerer earlier, right? She writes about this at length in her work. All kinds of folks, you know, especially Indigenous writers within the US, right, who in North America, more broadly, are engaging with, you know, these kind of questions. But for someone like
00:26:17
Speaker
Ito Hiromi Ito, who's moving to Southern California, is coming right around the time of the aftermath of 9-11. And this is something she writes about quite a bit in her work, is watching the U.S. change and become very anti-immigration after 9-11, and seeing how that sort of xenophobia was mirrored in the way that yeah the plant life was dealt with around her neighborhood. and you know it's It's a very curious thing because on the one hand, she recognizes and in some of her work that you know eucalyptus trees, you know which are everywhere around here in Southern California and are
00:27:06
Speaker
not native, right, and are invasive. And she has this sort of ominous feeling seeing the eucalyptus trees, but then there's this very powerful thought-provoking, i you know, I always hesitate say hesitate to say problematic because i don't I don't really know how to feel about this part of the book, but she's watching Iceplant being uprooted and feeling really Devastated right and calling them corpses and saying you know this is ah an eradication of this plant and if anything.
00:27:37
Speaker
The ice plant, know as an invasive species, is the one that is strong and persevered and survived. And so so you get this idea that like she and she says this, right that she's come over to the side of the invasive and sees them as her own flesh and blood in a certain way. And that that really challenges the way, sort of ecological way of thinking about something like ice plant. And so it's it's, yeah, it's something that really forces us to think differently about this conversation and the rhetoric of invasive, naturalized, and native. you know Another example is she talks about a plant that has been growing in Japan for so long but is still considered you know naturalized, not not native. right
00:28:26
Speaker
And she says, well, you know at what point does it become native? like It's been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. like So yeah, I think it's it's an interesting perspective on a conversation that I feel like we're all still sort of trying to figure out. And as someone, again, who is not a scientist, right she she has a sort of different take on it that I think is a very useful and provocative part of this conversation.
00:28:57
Speaker
Yeah, with any one of these species or plants, there's so many different stories that they can tell. One of those is the ecological devastation caused by a plant. One is, yeah, history of of movement, its own story and life history. And yeah she really yeah, she's identifying with them. Can you just describe what the ice plants look like? Yeah, so ice plants, wow, what do they look like? That's a good question. have I mean, they're they're succulents, right? So they they have these kind of green, almost turquoise-y, in some cases, some are a little deeper green, sort of a fleshy,
00:29:45
Speaker
like little appendages, right? So you can almost imagine, like, hundreds and hundreds of little green fingers sticking up from the ground. But they have these these really beautiful flowers, right? They produce these these very round, brightly colored flowers that, you know, Mimi writes about that, you know, she looks at them and she can only see them as eyes, right? Because they they kind of look like eyes. eyes And so, yeah, there's it's almost as if the ice plant is staring and back at you. But yeah, I mean, it's all over the place here and in in Southern California. Well, even in Northern California, right? It was introduced as an attempt to curtail erosion along the coast, and then later along the railways or railroads, maybe both. But i you know speaking to this this idea of, like,
00:30:32
Speaker
personal memory alongside. i mean I remember when I first moved to California, um which was in 1999, I'm dating myself a little here, but I went out to UC Santa Cruz for college. And it was my first time living on the West Coast. And I just remember being really enthralled by the ice plant, right? Because it was so strange and weirdly beautiful, and it was just everywhere. So I associated it with the beach. And yeah, I didn't really learn the kind of disdain that people had for it until later on.
00:31:10
Speaker
I had to, to look up what they, what they were. And then, oh, they're in the azaceae family. We have them in Australia too. The endocarpal Brutus is the genus, but here they're called pig face. But when I like, they feel like special native plants here, coastal, similar habitat. And I saw that in the book. I thought now like, Oh no, not you. not you yeah But I can, yeah, I could relate to that. So, so much, so many. I'm Canadian, I live in Australia, so many of the plants that basically when I moved, the only plants that I could recognize and identify with were essentially weeds that Europeans had brought around with them everywhere they went. And that's that's why, but they felt a little bit friendlier here, or they connected a different way. And I just had a recent experience walking and there was this beautiful verbena plant, which
00:32:08
Speaker
you know in In Canada, they're nice wetland plants, tall herbaceous plants with these beautiful purple flowers. And then I saw one here and I thought, oh wow, verbena, special plant here. and i And I looked it up and it was also a weed again. You feel solidarity with them a bit. right right
00:32:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's it's hard not to, right? and but but it's also you know And this is something Hiromi does in her work in general. like it's just It reminds us that we're all in motion, right? Successively over generations, people move, plants move, animals move, we all do. It doesn't mean that there aren't consequences for that movement, right but you know the the sort of privileging of pre-lapsarian, pristine environments, that also has consequences. right And I don't know i so So where I work and teach at UC Irvine, if anybody has ever been to UC Irvine, one of the really nice things about the campus is we're sort of built around a park. So there's a round circular park in the center of campus and everything sort of radiates from there. But there there's a project happening right now where they're removing a lot of the non-native species and and trying to replant and and redesign the park with native plants. And again, like, I understand this is a great thing and native plants are wonderful. But it's also, I've gotten so used to seeing these towering eucalyptus trees, right, that have just defined that space for me for so long. And then I'll go one day and
00:33:57
Speaker
Three of them have just disappeared and it's it's just the it's a very uncanny strange feeling that I'm still sort of wrapping my head around It's so yeah, I mean eucalyptus another one it's so Breaks the mind to think of them outside of Australia. There's such signifiers of this this land in this country and I Yeah, I mean, it's just such an interesting tale of folly to think that, you know, all the decisions to to move plants and their different properties and then to think that they could be controlled. um Right. Right. it It's a different conversation. What the lessons to learn from that. Yeah. Yeah, I guess going from
00:34:48
Speaker
tree spirits and grass spirits to a different kind of spiritual realm and lens. And another really curious work that I think we both love and are fascinated by, The Secret Life of Plants, changing changing direction a little bit here. Another very fun, hilarious mind opening and growing work. I came across The Secret Life of Plants while I was studying my plant science masters in 2013 when Michael Pollan wrote The Intelligent Plant, this amazing New Yorker article that talks a lot about this curious book written by Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins in the 70s, I believe. And it's just such a
00:35:34
Speaker
ah compelling and strange and fun work. I guess can you tell me a little bit about this book, your interest in it, and of course one of the researchers featured in it that you have spent a lot of time thinking about. Yeah. You know, you say we're we're changing topics, but in some ways, I mean, what's what's interesting about The Secret Life of Plants, this book, is it it has its own sort of reception history in Japan. And I mean, I know from experience, like, if I if i go to bookstores in Japan,
00:36:07
Speaker
And I kind of look for the section where they've grouped a lot of these, um, critical plant studies texts that have been translated, right? So works like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Stefano Mancuso, right? And, uh, kocha and minyokocha, like these these folks have all been translated into Japanese and they all sort of get grouped together on the same shelf in the bookstore. And inevitably sitting right next to them is the translation of the secret life of plants. So, you know, it's it's it's a part of that field one way or another. You know, I think folks in STEM, folks who've who've done real scientific research on plants have had to live under the shadow of that book for so long.
00:36:48
Speaker
Yeah. It's very controversial. Right. Whereas you know in the humanities, we can think of it as a cultural text and approach it without some of that baggage right or interrogate what that baggage is and talk about it. and Some of this baggage is that there's chapters called Plants Have ESP and mushrooms are from outer space. and Right. yeah Yeah, it goes off the deep end in several places, but I mean, this was a best selling work, right? It sold so many copies. It was a real cultural phenomenon in the US s and in Japan as well, right? They made a
00:37:27
Speaker
a film version where Stevie Wonder did the soundtrack. This this really was um an important text in a lot of ways. So my interest in it, you know as you as you mentioned, there is a figure who is discussed in the book by the name of Hashimoto Ken. So he's a fascinating figure, but I sort of stumbled upon his work and found that he is discussed ah in The Secret Life of Plants. And he's someone who um has a very interesting career starting out as a very, again, sort of legitimate mainstream scientist, electrical engineer, um who becomes very interested in the paranormal and the supernatural. So Hashimoto Ken is somebody who became a
00:38:20
Speaker
Really like a best-selling of writer in Japan and just wrote so many books about things like ESP and Extra dimensions and all this kind of stuff um And along the way he discovered the work of Cleve Baxter who was discussed very prominently in the secret life of plants another very interesting figure um someone who was absolutely foundational in the development of the polygraph of you know the lie detector test cleave baxter is someone who felt the polygraph machine was a way to communicate with all kinds of entities including plants right um on a kind of molecular electrical level. and so Hashimoto ken and his wife became very fascinated by this idea.
00:39:10
Speaker
And they became kind of media sensations in Japan by ah using polygraph machines to, you know, they would attach them to cacti and ostensibly teach However, we want to think of it, right? Teach the cacti to to sing. to um Yeah, there's there's this article that I discovered in the archives where Hashimoto writes about teaching cacti to sing. There's a clip in the film version of The Secret Life of Plants where you can see his wife trying to teach the cactus how to pronounce the Japanese syllabary, like the Japanese alphabet.
00:39:56
Speaker
Lots of people did believe this, right? when When the Hashimoto's would go on TV, I found traces in the writings of some very prominent, serious Japanese writers who seemingly saw these kind of experiments, quote-unquote, happen on TV and took them seriously, right? And really engaged with these ideas. And so I'm very interested in how Yeah, the secret life of plants and this this belief in these kinds of extra sensory capabilities, capacities of plants that are possible through technology, how they have sort of, you know, sort of filtered into Japanese culture more broadly and into literature and cinema and this kind of stuff.
00:40:47
Speaker
And I think something that the book really does is just pose the question, what if what if plants did do things or make decisions or interact with people or one another or the world in ways that we couldn't imagine, right? And that's that's extraordinary that it could even open up that idea. Yeah. and and and Right. And in that way, it's it's it's a work that's really trying to push against a kind of anthropocentric mindset, right? That has been at the heart of, you know, a lot of our work, those of us who are in the environmental humanities, right? So there is something to celebrate in that and that what if, for sure. Yeah. Thinking about just supernatural is so interesting. Plants are also
00:41:35
Speaker
it's It's not supernatural, it is natural, but just other, other, as bizarre as anything, come here to us. They're so different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At what point does that alterity, like, is the only way we can think of it in in sort of religious, spiritual terms, paranormal, supernatural terms, right? I think the the sort of wealth of of texts that are coming out now about the wood-wide web and ray about ah the use of of plants using photochemicals and things like that and communication. like There's such a hunger for trying to understand what this is. yeah i think it all that That wanting to bridge that alterity in some way has existed for so long. And it's just, well, well how do you want to make that bridge? right Is it through a religious spiritual understanding? Is it something weirder? Or do you really want to cling to dominant science? right
00:42:34
Speaker
These are all ways of knowing plants, right, or thinking about plants. There's another work that you mentioned to me that I believe kind of helped set the stage for how Hashimoto Ken's work was received in Japan. And it's this earlier ah novel about trees connecting to spirits after the war. Can you tell me about this work? Yeah, absolutely. so um this is
00:43:05
Speaker
this is um so i Again, i you know I've referred a couple times to this this academic you know monograph that I'm i'm working on that will be coming out in spring of next year. And so there will be the chapter on Hiromi's work. um and And then there will be this other chapter that deals with Hashimoto Ken. um but But thinking about Hashimoto's work alongside, as you mentioned, this much earlier text. So this is a ah book um that the English translation for the title would be Dead Spirits. The writer is a very, very prominent intellectual activist, you know that just a sort of paragon of like leftist political thought in post-war Japan. um His name is Haniya Yutaka, a literary critic as well.
00:43:53
Speaker
You know, somebody who is taken very seriously and and thought of in a kind of prestigious light, um someone who ah was imprisoned for his leftist communist beliefs during the war, um was very sick in prison, had a very difficult time during the interwar years, but survived. And in the post-war, and so beginning in 1946, so so pretty much, you know, very quickly after Japan surrenders to the U.S. and is occupied by the U.S. military, he begins writing this text called Dead Spirits. And it's a it's a complex work. It is
00:44:40
Speaker
extremely philosophical. It's the kind of text that even within the realm of like Japanese literary studies, everybody sort of knows it. They respect it. Very few people read it because it's it's so long. It's very challenging. um This is a work that he again began writing in 1946, but really wrote throughout the rest of his life. And so he every so often he would contribute new volumes to it um up until his death in the 1990s. So you can kind of see this long expansive temporal span that this work unfolds on you know alongside.
00:45:20
Speaker
But what fascinated me about this text when I first read it in graduate school was clearly this is a work about the post-war. It's about the trauma of the war. It's about coming to terms with death and defeat and a kind of loss of belief in in in all kinds of things, right? But it's a work that doesn't really talk about the war at all. And so my sort of thinking with this book is it is an elegy for
00:45:55
Speaker
Haniya's dead compatriots, right folks who who did lose their life in the war, it's it's dealing with that trauma. um But it's trying to think of how to express those that affect, those feelings, um without being quite so literal about it. right And so the way that that happens is through trees, through the forest. And so you get these long descriptions of characters just wandering through forests in Tokyo in parks and having this sense of ah of a presence. this this There's this word in Japanese, keihai, which is a very common word. It can just mean a trace or a kind of presence or a sense of something. um But
00:46:40
Speaker
this word kept kept popping up. right kaha k hi right like They're walking through the forest and they feel like there's somebody behind them. There's somebody in the trees. right It's this kind of ghostly apparition, this this mystical feeling. um And I started thinking about this word, kehi, right? And I was able to find some interesting ah sort of theoretical writing about this term. And the ke in kehi is the same word um as ki, which and English speakers probably know better from the Chinese qi, right? So if you've heard of qi, right, the sort of cosmic
00:47:26
Speaker
Energy, right? um That's this word key, but it's also ah a homonym in Japanese for a tree. And so there is some speculation that very notion of key sort of runs throughout this idea of of Chi or spirit and trees, right? And so you got to think, you know, Hanya Yutaka is writing in the, you know, aftermath of the war. This is a war where spirituality you know Shintoism, it was mobilized right as a state religion that pushed many to sacrifice their own lives for a spiritual cause in war. And so I kind of see this text as a way for him to
00:48:12
Speaker
reclaim a certain notion of spiritual relationship to the forest and to trees, right? That isn't within this ideology of militant Shinto belief, right? That there's something about the ghosts and the the loss and the death that ah hovers among these trees, right? And so that was how I understood this this text. And I found it quite beautiful and sad. And I knew I wanted to write about it. And then I started reading up on Hashimoto Ken and seeing how, oh, well, he's writing about trees and spirits also, and you know that trees become a medium, right? That trees are this this medium that connect the world of living to the world of the dead.
00:49:01
Speaker
And I'm like, there's got it you know it's it's so fascinating to me that in 1946, this very prominent literary author is thinking about trees in this way right as a kind of medium. um And then in the 1970s and 80s, we have this pseudoscientist, if you will, right who's arguing something similar And then I just kind of stumbled upon an interview that Haniya, the writer of Dead Spirits, was giving um later on in his life where they were discussing Dead Spirits, this novel, and they start talking about stuff that's directly out of the secret life of plants. right
00:49:43
Speaker
like like They don't mention the Secret Life of Plants by name, but they talk about experiments with plants and playing the music and how plants prefer classical music and how airport airport noise causes weeds to grow because it awakens the seeds. like These are all directly things from the Secret Life of Plants. and so I was like, OK, there is some kind of very unexpected lineage here. Right. And um so that's what that chapter is, is it's trying to think about that lineage and taking it one step further and looking at a novel that was written after the 2011 March 11th, 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown up in Northeastern Japan.
00:50:32
Speaker
a novel where um the writer is envisioning a deceased DJ who is broadcasting a radio um show out to the living and the dead after after that tsunami. and he's doing it from the top of a tree, right? So this this tree becomes ah like a radio broadcasting tower. So once again, it's this medium, right? It's this medium that's connecting the living and the dead.
00:51:04
Speaker
ah yeah and I guess going from fiction to the to the living, another something that you've written about also are the witness trees of Hiroshima. and can you Can you talk a little bit about these these trees and the field guide? Yeah, so this is ah an article that I wrote for a special issue of the journal Injilaki that was about
00:51:39
Speaker
non-human witnessing basically, right witnessing in the Anthropocene and and thinking about what would it mean to be a witness but not be human. And so that got me thinking about what they call the hibakaju, hibakaju moku, which are the trees that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is a sort of phenomenon, these trees, you know that have been written about quite a bit. As you can imagine, they've become sort of a symbol of resilience. right There's all kinds of personal accounts of human survivors who, in the aftermath of
00:52:17
Speaker
the absolute destruction of Hiroshima would would see these trees that survived and, you know, the the following spring when they sprouted new leaves, they gave them hope, right? So there there are a lot of these, I guess you could call them feel-good kind of stories, right? But I became really interested in thinking about testimony and what what how can we understand the very sort of material survivance and the way that these trees, damage is is in inscribed into their flesh, right into their bark. How do we understand not just the sort of human testimony in relation to the trees, but you know what what is the testimony itself? And so there is a book, a really wonderful book by Michael Marder, which Michael Marder is
00:53:09
Speaker
Somebody who's quite well known within the world of critical plant studies and plant humanities he is the editor of the critical plant studies book series for Brill Press, but he has this short book that's called the Chernobyl herbarium is they are these short pieces that are um autobiographical in some cases, ah reflecting on Martyr's childhood and his exposure to some of the radiation in you know from stemming from Chernobyl. And these little anecdotes, little philosophical passages are juxtaposed to the artwork of Anais Tondur
00:53:51
Speaker
And these are photograms, right? So they're not photographs. They're used as photosensitive paper to make a kind of imprint of actual plants that were grown in the nuclear exclusion zone in Chernobyl. And so it's this really beautiful, complex book that I had been thinking a lot about. And and I discovered this tour guide that was written by a kind of independent scholar in Japan, not very well known, named Sugihara Rieko. And she wrote this book called Pilgrimage to the Abomed Trees.
00:54:30
Speaker
And it's literally a book of maps and photographs and reflections on all of the different trees in Hiroshima that are still alive that survived the atomic bomb. And so I i was trying to think about these two texts side by side. And so so it became a really interesting article for me to think about what's going on across these two books, one very much written for like an academic audience and the other written for the public, the kind of resonances between yeah what what these texts were were saying about trees. And so, yeah, I had the great opportunity to make a trip to Hiroshima and to to visit the trees and
00:55:14
Speaker
it's i mean It's amazing. They're they are all cataloged. They have numbers. They have little plaques by all of them. um and You can yeah very much just go and and visit them. It's quite an experience to to stand in front of these trees and kind of reflect on on what they have witnessed. I was so interested to hear that there is a celebrity tree in Japan, the most famous tree in Japan. And a lot of people will make pilgrimage to this tree to connect to a different era, different time period, different part of history to people who have lived before. ah Trees are these monuments, right, in North America too. Being in the experience of a larger old tree is very spiritual. Can you tell me about
00:56:05
Speaker
this tree. it's ah It's another chapter of your your book, I believe. ah So this will actually be a chapter for um a collected volume. So it won't be a part of of the the book, um but it will be its its own chapter in um a volume that I don't quite know when it's coming out yet. It'll be still still a ways off. um But it's a book that's about large old trees and that'll come out through Springer. So yeah, so the tree that we're talking about here is the Jomon Sugi. Sugi being the Japanese cedar. Jomon referring to essentially prehistoric Japan. So it's it's this time period before recorded history. The reason it's called that is
00:56:53
Speaker
The common belief, right the sort of like conventional claim about this tree is that it's over 7,000 years old. 7,200 years old is the number you get seen, passed around, and and the chapter gets into why. This was a ah claim that was made Well, it was it was promoted through an effort to increase tourism to this island. So it's it's on ah it's on a relatively small island called Yakushima. It's been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which has been something of a double-edged sword for the residents of the island.
00:57:31
Speaker
anime fans out there or Miyazaki Studio Ghibli fans, right? If you've seen Princess Mononoke, the forests of Princess Mononoke are somewhat um inspired based on these forests on Yaku-shima. So there is this very old tree, the 7000 number You know actual scientists will tell you yeah they will tell you this is this is not this is likely not the case and the person who made that estimate his estimate his ah his methodology was a little suspect the chapter that I wrote is
00:58:07
Speaker
looking at the different sort of literary, the way that ah the tree appears in in in literature. So what's fascinating about it is, right, it's it's this tree that certainly has been alive for thousands of years, however many thousand we want to think. So definitely predates you know, the the at least the written history of Japan. But it really wasn't, quote unquote, discovered, right, until relatively recently. And so you don't have
00:58:39
Speaker
this long literary history right that that talks about this tree. So really everything that's been written about this tree um you know comes from like the 70s onward. right And so it's this weird thing where these are all relatively modern and contemporary texts that are trying to think about something very old and prehistoric. And so that's a very interesting tension. um that I found in these works, but also I think because
00:59:13
Speaker
it does have this sort of mysterious aura because it's so old. It's also a tree that pops up a lot in science fiction, in fantasy novels, things like that, right? So once again, we can see how it sort of gets taken up in these supernatural, right? Sort of paranormal ways of thinking. I think kind of in a similar way to something like Stonehenge, for example, right? Stonehenge being this monument, like you mentioned, but that we don't know everything about, but we know it's old. But just imagine, well, what if Stonehenge was actually alive, right? That would be even more sort of beguiling and invite a lot of speculation. And we've mentioned it a few times already, but I guess, can you introduce the monograph, the work that you are working on? Is that something you can speak about?
01:00:09
Speaker
yeah i can Yeah, I can speak about it. It's it's nearing completion, right academic publishing. you know It takes a long time, but the work is under contract with Cornell University Press in their environments of East Asia book series. I recommend listeners of this podcast go check out that series because it's all open access, which is one of the reasons I'm so thrilled to be publishing with them. So so my book will come out, it's looking like April of 2025 at this point. um But it is a book that kind of deals with a lot of the things we've already been talking about. But the central premise is it looks at
01:00:50
Speaker
I think a kind of unlikely constellation of of writers and filmmakers in Japan's modern period that are thinking about plants in very interesting ways. The sort sort of central conceit, the trope that I'm identifying in the book is what I call becoming botanical. So the idea is these different writers, these filmmakers, are all responding to different moments of crisis in in modern Japanese history by imagining what it could mean to be more plant-like. And so there's there's a phenomenological aspect to that, right where you see some writers like actually getting into, well, what would it feel like to to be a plant, right? There's more sort of philosophical takes on that. I mentioned Hiromi, right, talking about plants as if they were her own flesh and blood and a part of her family. So yeah, so that's that's sort of the the central conceit of the book. The title
01:01:50
Speaker
will either be rethinking plants botanical imagination in modern Japan, or it'll be botanical imagination rethinking plants in modern Japan. um I'm hoping it'll introduce, well, not new, but some some different writers, Japanese writers, to a wider readership. you know We have this thing that sort of happens within Japanese studies. And maybe this is common for a lot of academic disciplines where you sort of just end up writing for people in your own field, right? The thing about plants is people have an in, right? I think there are so many people interested in plants and in plant studies and in plants and Japan, right? That I really tried to write this book in a manner that was going to be accessible to a wider readership.
01:02:40
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. um and And the central, i well, I don't know if it's the central concept, but um phytomorphism, that's the the language that you're using to talk about becoming botanical, or is that something different? Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, so phytomorphism is is a term that I've i've used um in some other contexts as well, but it's very important to this book. um Right. so So phyto, obviously relating to plants. And yeah, phyto-morphism is my sort of intervention into the conversation about um anthropomorphism, right? So phyto-morphism, anthropomorphism.
01:03:28
Speaker
One of the things that happens a lot in the world of critical plant studies is um a kind of dismissal right of, well, this is just anthropomorphism. Anytime you want to think about plants in in humanistic ways, like you're just you're just engaging in anthropomorphism. right And there are very um valid reasons to be concerned about anthropomorphism. you know There are some thinkers who will say, actually, anthropomorphism isn't all that bad, and it's a way to try and get us to think
01:04:04
Speaker
about non-humans in more critical and ethical ways. um But certainly, right there is a kind of anthropocentric bias if you're just applying human values and capacities to more than human beings. right But what I find in a lot of these texts that I'm looking at is not anthropomorphism, or at least not in the way we usually think about it. right but rather the opposite.
01:04:36
Speaker
right the ascribing of plant-like characteristics to the human. right It just switches the directionality of that sort of metaphorical move the other way around. And and I do think anthropomorphism in a way allows for that. right It creates this bridge that then stays open for um you know the plant-like ways of being to seep back into the way we think about ourselves. And so one of the texts that I write about um in the book is this really fascinating novella from the 1930s called Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense ah by ah this this modernist woman writer Osaki Midori.
01:05:28
Speaker
And one of the ah plot points of this novella is there's a character who is conducting botanical experiments in his room, and he's trying to get plants to fall in love. Right. This is, this is how the text talks about it. And the sort of general reading of that is, oh, this is just a case of anthropomorphism. You know, this is just silly experimental writing. You know, this is not serious. But if you actually read the text,
01:06:04
Speaker
um And you engage with scientific writing in Japan at the time, you realize, well, actually, there was a conversation around love in plants, right? um This was an operative term within scientific discourse at the time. And what the text is actually doing is saying, and one of the characters outright says this in the novella, you know, the love that we as humans feel is an inheritance from plants in deep evolutionary time, right? So it's not that in saying plants, you know, moss in this case falls in love is us anthropomorphizing moss to acknowledge that humans ourselves fall in love. This is a phytomorphic gesture, right? This is saying we have this plant-like capacity in us, right? This is at least how the novella is portraying it.
01:06:59
Speaker
let Plants did it first, didn't they? Plants did it first, yeah. We are actually in touch with the planty side of ourselves when we fall in love, right? um So that that sort of thinking, right that sort of phytomorphic gesture is is just fascinating to me because it has all kinds of implications for what it means to be human. Wow. Just brought a big smile to my face thinking about the millions and millions of years where plants just loved on earth before we...
01:07:38
Speaker
you know I tend to get very excited when when talking about this stuff. and you know I think that's that's been the real kind of gift to me that plants have given me is a way to really enjoy what I research and what I write about and think about. and I just get very excited and I want to instill that excitement to others.
01:08:11
Speaker
That was my conversation with Dr. John Pitt. Thank you for listening and thank you to John for sharing his work. Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by me, Katherine Paltz, and our music is by Carl Dider. Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our website at plantkingdom dot.earth.
01:08:55
Speaker
you