10 Jon Pitt: Becoming botanical

[00:00:00] I'm Catherine Polcz and this is Plank Kingdom. I'm recording in beautiful Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the E-Orination and pay respect to their elders past, present, and future. Plank Kingdom is a conversation series about plants, nature, and environment, featuring scientists, artists, researchers, and writers.

[00:00:32] We've released two conversations each month and hear from people who have an intimacy with plant and nature. We discuss their work, stories, and reflections from the field. Today's conversation is with Dr. Jon Pitt. Our conversation follows a few conceptual threads.

[00:00:48] We spoke about trees, trees as monuments, trees as witnesses, trees as connecting to the past in future. We spoke about critical plant studies. Jon's recent translation of the work, Tree Spirits, Grass Spirits by acclaimed Japanese

[00:01:05] poet, Hiromi Eto, and also what we can gain from becoming botanical or thinking like a plant. Jon 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.

[00:01:28] Here's our conversation. Thank you so much, Jon, for chatting today. 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.

[00:01:54] 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.

[00:02:09] First let me just thank you for inviting me on here. It's a great podcast, I'm really thrilled to be a part of it. So critical plant studies, you may also hear it being called by another name which is the plant humanities.

[00:02:25] 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 expressing

[00:02:39] the idea that ultimately what this field is is it's taking the methodologies, you know, the sort of traditional approaches of the humanities and allowing those methodologies to help us think about plants, right?

[00:02:55] But 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.

[00:03:09] 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 and critical plant studies becomes this interesting way of adding to those conversations.

[00:03:22] Plants become another actor that allows us to rethink some of those pre-step positions, and those sort of biases that we might have. And so on the one hand, there's, you know, I think when I talk to people about critical

[00:03:41] plant studies, I think a lot of people can sort of get their mind around thinking with plants in a metaphorical sense, right? Notions of ethnicity and homeland, right? And and migrants see in all these things.

[00:03:55] But the thing I really like about critical plant studies, and I think this is a really important element to the field, is it's also very much engaged with science to a certain degree, right? And the actual biology, the material qualities of plants themselves, right?

[00:04:16] So it's not just at a sort of textual metaphorical level. There's a lot to say within critical plant studies about the plants themselves. For me, it's sort of a outgrowth of the greater environmental humanities project, right? It's interdisciplinary.

[00:04:32] 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 a long answer. The short answer is a bit more like, you know, it's, it's folks in the humanities trying to be

[00:04:47] interdisciplinary in their work to think about plants more seriously. Both in terms of textual representation, but also in history and very material interactions and co-productions that humans share with plants in the real material world.

[00:05:08] Thank you. I think I said such a broad field, the ways that we think about connect to plants, how they represent in culture and life is, is so broad, isn't it? And it's kind of an away invisible to us because it's so ubiquitous too.

[00:05:25] We'll touch upon that I think plants as a vehicle to have other conversations about other parts of our life and our world are so interesting. And I don't know, maybe it's not surprising, but it's a lot of people don't necessarily have

[00:05:42] free to suppose strong opinions about plants in their life, but I guess that's the power of plants sometimes, isn't it? That's true. And you know, I think people probably do have stronger opinions about plants than they even realize. Some of those are aesthetic obviously, right?

[00:06:03] We all, I'm 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 in our diets. So yeah, I mean, it's the kind of thing

[00:06:16] where plants, as you said, 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] really push us to be more cognizant and aware of how thoroughly entangled so much of our everyday life. Even just down to breathing in and breathing out, right? I mean, this is a relationship.

[00:06:45] It's a relationship that we share with plant life. So what if we did take that very seriously? And I guess how did plants enter your life for your academic life and work? When did your interest turn to plants or were they always there?

[00:07:03] Yeah. So kind of going back to that last question, like, 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

[00:07:16] in terms of the plant life, right? And so I have these deep sort of emotional resonances with landscapes and certain plants. But as far as something of an academic object, like research object,

[00:07:28] 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 there's a critical plant studies is sort of half of where I situate my work.

[00:07:40] Like I imagine one of my feet sort of on that pillar and then the other one is in the realm of Japan studies, right? And so I research and teach and write about Japan and Japanese literature

[00:07:53] in cinema and sort of media texts more broadly. And so I entered graduate school, you know, a PhD program, knowing I wanted to continue learning about Japan and Japanese literature in cinema.

[00:08:05] 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, right? And the sort of way that the supernatural

[00:08:18] still manifests in Japanese literature and cinema in interesting ways, 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

[00:08:31] on the city in urban space, technology, right? And all this stuff. I ended up doing a or participating in a like a field work research trip over the summer. I think after my first

[00:08:44] year of graduate school 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

[00:08:56] 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

[00:09:12] group where we learned a lot about what and the way wood is used in contemporary Japanese architecture, some of it being religious architecture, some of it being very commercial. And I had the good

[00:09:27] fortune of having face-to-face sort of sit down interview with Kuma Kengo, who was 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.

[00:09:45] 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 hap hazard looking

[00:10:03] almost looks just like a pile of wood. Just stacked up that uses all of these traditional Japanese wooden joints and things. And again, I was very interested in the supernatural in thinking about wood and architecture. There's something sort of supernatural going on with wood

[00:10:21] as a material. And so I got to ask the architect Kuma Kengo directly. Do you think of wood as an architectural material as having some sort of spiritual or sacred quality to it? And he just

[00:10:35] kind of looked and he said, yeah, you know, what is a kind of God? And the architecture people I was with were all like shocked. Like, you know, this is a commercial building. How can

[00:10:44] 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

[00:10:58] go into like the supernatural and manifestations of monsters and things like that. If wood in the city can somehow be in the mind of one of Japan's most premier architects and kind of God. There's a

[00:11:11] lot to say about trees and wood. And so that's sort of what ended up kick-starting the rest of my research for the dissertation was then turning more to plants, thinking more about plants, seeing

[00:11:22] the way that they popped up in the works I was reading. That's amazing. And we'll talk more about trees, but trees do seem to have special access to some of these ideas, don't they?

[00:11:38] They do. And you know, trees are, yeah, when you start thinking about trees in Japan, there's just so many different sort of like vectors of ways of thinking about it. So on the one hand,

[00:11:50] right, Japan is a to this day still a very heavily forested place, which, you know, you compare that to other industrial nations, states throughout the world, right? Japan gets lauded as a place that

[00:12:04] is done a very good job of keeping its forests. It's a you will see environmentalists like praising Japan for having this almost stereotypical, you know, harmonious relationship with its trees and its forests. The thing is, right, so many of those forests are plantation forests.

[00:12:24] And the reason they've been able to grow in thrive, if we want to call it thriving is because Japan has imported so much lumber, right? So much timber from Southeast Asia. And so it's not

[00:12:36] 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 trees, you know, these trees that are

[00:12:48] deemed sacred. So there's all kinds of competing if you want to call them ideologies or ways of knowing trees in particular that sort of overlap and brush up against each other in Japan.

[00:13:02] And so those are the kind of things I love to try to tease out in my research. Perfect introduction to the work I wanted to to speak with you about, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits. Translated by you originally published I believe in 2014 written by the poet,

[00:13:20] her Romney Eto. Can you tell me about this book? Sure. So this is a book that is a sort of compendium of dory's long form poems. And they were written as you said, sort of in the early

[00:13:38] arts, right? When Hido Mi Eto, the poet was still living in the United States. And so for several decades, Eto lived in Southern California, not very far from where I currently live in in work,

[00:13:54] 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.

[00:14:03] 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

[00:14:18] in the US in Southern California for a Japanese audience. And so that's really fascinating, right? Because again, it sort of achieved some of that defamiliarization that we were talking about

[00:14:30] earlier without using that term, right? But on the one hand, it's a work that I think can be very easy to read. That's one of the things about Hido Mi's work is they are very lyrical.

[00:14:47] It kind of, 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

[00:15:01] questions are being asked in the process. And so it's about plants, but it's very much about being an immigrant into the United States and raising children in a country that you are not

[00:15:15] 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 process one's life and think about one's life alongside the plants that have been these

[00:15:35] 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

[00:15:57] daily interactions with plants. I felt we're kind of represented as quasi family members. They go through life's moments with her. They're the street plants in their own front yard and on the garden. While also their holders of memory and culture and the connectative place and they're such a

[00:16:18] longing for the plants of home in book two. Yeah, there's so many different lenses and ways that plants are presented in the work. And I guess why? Why did you want to translate this work for

[00:16:37] English audiences? This is a big undertaking. Yeah, it is a big undertaking. I will say that it wasn't undertaking that I was able to accomplish largely because of the free time. It sounds

[00:16:56] weird to say that but the free time that I was afforded during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Right, so I found myself indoors as many of us did. And translating this work became a real

[00:17:09] lifeline for me a way to still be sort of engaged in an in-language. With the whipy outside world and with plants and the kinds of things that I didn't have the same sort of daily interactions

[00:17:22] that I did pre-pandemic. But you know, I was familiar with 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 while

[00:17:38] there is a recognizable voice that runs throughout them, you know, she's somebody who's writing poetry, modern poetry. She's translating, doing like modern translations of traditional classical Japanese folklore. She's writing works about food, about plants. I really thought it would be

[00:18:02] 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. This text seems like the one that

[00:18:19] to me felt the strongest, right? She has other books about plants and they're all great in their own ways. This one I think because it deals a little bit more directly with the kind of things

[00:18:30] that you were picking up on, right? 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] 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

[00:18:56] for the monograph that I have been working on. It's a profound 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

[00:19:08] academic chapter on Hidomi's work. And I got to a certain point where I said, well, I've already translated so much of this in bits and pieces like I might as well just try and do the whole thing.

[00:19:20] But it also gives back to that idea that critical plant studies that world or the plant humanities, there just wasn't a lot of voices from East Asian writers. And for me, I've made this

[00:19:37] claim before. This is a text that I feel like somebody who really responds to Robin Wall Kimmer's work, confined something in some ways similar in some ways very different, right?

[00:19:50] But it's sort of of of that spirit in a way to me, that's sort of blending of the auto biographical auto ethnography, thinking about plants, thinking about culture, history and literature. Like, there is something similar there. And so I just sort of had this vision of some day

[00:20:08] seeing tree spirits grasp here. It's sitting alongside, creating a sweet grass or something like that. And I think it offers something different alongside some of those other works. Something I just wanted to say, I love that it's not about the utility of plants or that plants are important

[00:20:29] or the science of plants. And that's just so nice too. It's true, yeah. I mean, you know, it means not a scientist, but what I love is she's so interested in scientific names, right? But she's not a scientist and she's a poet, right?

[00:20:48] She's a writer. Like, she thinks about the kind of poetics of Latin, no one in clay, and 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] yeah, 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 scientific Latin names, the family names of plants, the common names, the English common names of plants.

[00:21:25] In, for example, I was just leaping through it again in the family name. So interesting talking about, she has a whole section talking about Poe-C, the grass family, and then she says that in Japan, it's the rice family. And just, you know, all the information, everything that

[00:21:40] signifies and means just in that one example. But a lot for you to navigate through many different names of plants, I guess if you want to just talk a little bit about the significance of

[00:21:51] names in this work and what your approach should it was and how you got through it. For sure, right? It was the most difficult part of the translation was was figuring that out. Because it's not, it's not just that there are all these different

[00:22:12] possibilities for how to translate a plant's name, right? But that she's very purposefully choosing different ways of referring to plants at different times and themeatizing that instability and drawing our attention to things like that, right? How the grass family is actually,

[00:22:33] in a college though. It's the rice family in Japan and trying to think about why might that be, right? So it was really just a case-by-case basis in trying to think like, okay, well,

[00:22:43] how is the point that she's trying to make here best served? Do I go with the Latin name? Do I use a transliteration of the Japanese name which I do quite a bit? And that's also why I'm very

[00:23:02] thrilled to have worked with nightboat books in publishing this because they really supported that decision to use a lot of transliterated Japanese in a way that is not always looked upon favorably in translation, right? Because it can be a little alienating to readers,

[00:23:24] English readers to see so much Japanese words and names that they don't recognize. But I talk about this a little bit in the translator's introduction and the book, but I kind of wanted that feeling of alienation because in a way it mirrors the story that

[00:23:42] he told me is trying to tell him the text, right? Where she goes to a nursery and sees an English common name and it doesn't mean anything to her, right? And so I just think it's a text that forces

[00:23:57] us to really think about how 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. She talks a lot about how different families were split up and reconfigured, right? After the change in APG categorization

[00:24:23] and how these things that we think of a scientific knowledge is not as stable as we want to believe it is. So yeah, the translating of the plant names was difficult but I also feel like that's the

[00:24:36] real heart of the book and I'm happy without turned out. Another, I guess, topic that comes throughout the book too is this relationship to a representation of invasive plants, non-native plants,

[00:24:55] what is a weed kind of the value of different plants and kind of the shock of seeing some plants from from home, from Japan as weeds in different contexts and vice versa too. And there's so many examples, there's a whole chapter about kutsu, tumble weeds, ice plants,

[00:25:19] thistles, there's just a lot of examples of this. Can you speak a little bit about this, this theme? 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

[00:25:40] invasive species and the kind of rhetoric that we use to talk about and value certain plants over others it's a very complicated conversation right and it's definitely an important conversation with in critical plant studies you know I mentioned Robin Wall Kimmer earlier right

[00:26:03] she writes about this at length in her were 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

[00:26:15] of questions but for someone like Eto you know Hiromi Eto who's moving to southern California is coming right around the time of the aftermath of 911 and this is something she writes about quite a bit in her work is watching the US change and become very anti-immigration after after 9

[00:26:39] 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

[00:26:58] recognizes and in some of her work that you know you clip to trees you know what you're everywhere around here in southern California and are 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

[00:27:15] thought-provoking you know I always hesitate to 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 ice plant being uprooted and feeling really devastated right and calling them corpses and saying you know this is

[00:27:33] an eradication of this plant and if anything the ice plant Ato has 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

[00:27:48] 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 it's sort of ecological way of thinking about something like

[00:28:01] ice plant right and so it's yeah it's something that really forces us to think differently about this conversation in 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 it's still considered

[00:28:23] naturalized not native right 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

[00:28:38] 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 has a sort of different take on it that I think

[00:28:50] is very useful and provocative part of this conversation 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

[00:29:08] caused by a plant one is yeah history of movement its own story in life history and yeah she really yes she's identifying with them can you just describe what the ice plants look like

[00:29:25] yeah so ice plant wow what do they look like that's a good question I have I mean there are succulents right so they they have these kind of green almost turquoisey in some cases

[00:29:41] some are a little deeper green sort of a fleshy 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

[00:29:58] flowers that you know me 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 and so yeah there's it's almost as if the ice

[00:30:08] plant is staring back at you but yeah I mean it's all over the place here in southern california well even in northern california right it was introduced as a attempt to curtail erosion along

[00:30:21] the coast and then later along the the rail or the highways or railroads maybe both but I you know it's speaking to this this idea of like personal memory alongside I mean I remember when I first

[00:30:36] moved to california which was in 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

[00:30:50] 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

[00:31:05] the kind of disdain that people had for it until later on I had to to look up what they what they were and then I went there in the AZICI family we have them in Australia too the

[00:31:19] under carbon fruit is is the genus but here they're called pink face but when I like they feel like special native plants here coast still similar habitat run I saw that in the book I thought

[00:31:30] like oh no not you but 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 the basically when I moved the only

[00:31:46] 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

[00:31:58] or they connected a different way and I just had a recent right right in there's this beautiful Iverbina plant which you know in Canada they're nice wetland plants tall tall herbacious plants with these beautiful purple flowers and then I saw one here and I thought oh wow like

[00:32:17] for Bina special special plant here and I looked it up and it was also a weed again you feel solidarity with them a bit right right yeah I think it's it's hard not to right

[00:32:34] but it but it's also you know and this is something kiddo me doesn't her work in general like it's just it reminds us that we're all in motion right successfully over generations people move

[00:32:49] plants move animals move we all do it doesn't mean that there are consequences for that movement right but you know the the sort of privileging of pre-lapse area and pristine environments

[00:33:04] that also has consequences right and I don't know so so where I work and teach at UC Irvine if anybody's ever been to UC Irvine one of the really nice things about the campus is

[00:33:19] we're sort of built around a park so there's a around circular park in the center of campus and everything sort of radiates from there but there there's a project happening right now where

[00:33:30] they're removing a lot of the non-native species 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

[00:33:50] have just defined that space for me for so long and then I'll go one day and three of them of disappeared and it's it's just the it's a very uncanny strange feeling that I'm still

[00:34:03] 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 a dignified of this this land in this country and yeah I mean it's just such an interesting tale of

[00:34:25] fallie too to think that you know all the decisions to move plants and they're different properties and then to think that they could be controlled right right it's a different conversation what the lessons to learn from that yeah yeah I guess going from

[00:34:48] tree spirits and grass spirits to a different kind of spiritual realm and lends in another really curious work that I think we both love and are fascinated by the secret life of plants changing direction a little bit here another very fun hilarious mind opening and growing

[00:35:10] work I came across the secret life of plants while I was studying my plant science masters in 2013 when Michael Paulen 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

[00:35:32] and it's just such a compelling and strange and fun work I guess can you tell me a little bit about this book you're interested in it and of course one of the researchers featured in it that

[00:35:44] you have spent a lot of time thinking about yeah you know you say we're changing topics but in some ways I mean what's interesting about the secret life of plants this book is it has a

[00:35:57] dome sort of reception history in Japan and I mean I know from experience like if I go to book stores in Japan and I kind of look for the section where they've grouped a lot of these

[00:36:11] critical plant studies texts that have been translated right so works like Robin Wall Kimber and Stefan Oman Kusou right in the culture I'm in the old culture like these these folks have

[00:36:21] 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

[00:36:32] you know it's it's a part of that field one way or another you know I think folks in stem folks who have who've done real scientific research on plants have had to live under the shadow

[00:36:46] of a book for so long yep 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

[00:36:59] 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 yeah it goes off the deep end in several places but

[00:37:18] I mean this was a best selling work right it sold so many copies it was a real cultural phenomenon in the US and in Japan as well right they made a film version where Stevie wondered did the soundtrack

[00:37:31] this this really was 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

[00:37:45] so he's a fascinating figure but I sort of stumbled upon his work and found that he is discussed in the secret life of plants and he's someone who has a very interesting career starting out as a very again sort of legitimate mainstream scientist electrical engineer

[00:38:10] who becomes very interested in the paranormal in the supernatural so Hashimoto Ken is somebody who became a real like a best selling of writer in Japan and just wrote so many books about things like

[00:38:25] ESP and extra dimensions and all this kind of stuff and along the way he discovered the work of Cleve Baxter who is discussed very prominently in the secret life of plants another very interesting figure someone who was absolutely foundational in the development of the polygraph

[00:38:49] you know the lie detector test Cleve Baxter is someone who felt the polygraph machine was a way to communicate with all kinds of entities including plants right on a kind of molecular electrical level and so Hashimoto Ken and his wife became very fascinated by this idea

[00:39:10] and they became kind of media sensations in Japan by using polygraph machines to you know they would attach them to Kakdai and ostensibly teach however we want to think of it right teach the

[00:39:28] Kakdai to to sing to yeah there's there's this article that I discovered in the archives where Hashimoto writes about teaching Kakdai to sing there's a clip in the film version of the secret life

[00:39:44] of plants where you can see his wife trying to teach the Kakdis how to pronounce the Japanese syllabary which Japanese alphabet lots of people did believe this right when when the Hashimoto

[00:39:59] '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

[00:40:17] right and really engaged with these ideas and so I'm very interested in how yeah the secret life of plants and this belief in these kind of extrasensory capabilities capacities of plants that are possible through technology how they have sort of you know sort of filtered into Japanese

[00:40:41] culture more broadly and into literature and cinema and this kind of stuff and I think something that the book really does is just post the question what if what if plants did do things or make

[00:40:56] 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 right

[00:41:11] and in that way it's it's it's a work that's really trying to push against kind of anthropocentric mindset right that has been at the heart of you know a lot of our work those of us who were in the

[00:41:23] environmental humanities right so there is something to celebrate in that in that what if for sure yeah thinking about just supernatural is so interesting it's plants are also it's not supernatural

[00:41:36] it is natural but just other other as bizarre as anything it come here to us they're so different yeah yeah at what point does that alterity like is the only way we can think of it in

[00:41:50] sort of religious spiritual terms paranormal supernatural terms right I think the the sort of wealth of texts that are coming out now about the woodwide web and right about the use of plants using you know photo chemicals and things like that communication like there's such a

[00:42:12] hunger for trying to understand what this is yeah and I think at 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

[00:42:25] 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 these are all ways of knowing plants right we're

[00:42:37] thinking about plants there's another work that you mentioned to me that I I believe kind of helped set the stage for how Hashimoto Ken's work was received in Japan and it's this earlier

[00:42:52] novel about trees connecting to spirits after the war can you tell me about this work yeah absolutely so this is this is um so I again I you know I've referred a couple times to this this academic

[00:43:12] you know monograph that I'm working on that we'll be coming out in spring of next year and so there will be the chapter on he don't means work and then there will be this other chapter that deals

[00:43:23] with Hashimoto Ken but but thinking about Hashimoto's work alongside as you mentioned this much earlier text so this is a book that the English translation for the title would be dead spirits the writer is

[00:43:39] a very very prominent intellectual activist you know just a sort of paradigm of like leftist political thought in post-war Japan his name is Hania Yutaka literary critic as well you know somebody

[00:43:54] who is taken very seriously and thought of in a kind of prestigious light someone who was imprisoned for his leftist communist beliefs during the war was very sick in prison had a very difficult time during the interwar years but survived and in the post-war in so beginning in 1946

[00:44:21] so so pretty much you know very quickly after Japan surrenders to the US and is occupied by the US military he begins writing this text called dead spirits and it's a complex work it is extremely

[00:44:41] 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

[00:44:54] very challenging 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 up until his death

[00:45:08] than the 1990s so you can kind of see this long expansive temporal span that this work unfolds on you know alongside but what fascinated me about this text when I first read it in graduate school

[00:45:26] 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

[00:45:42] 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 energy for Hania's dead compatriots right folks who did lose their life in the

[00:46:00] war it's it's dealing with that trauma but it's trying to think of how to express those that affect those feelings without being quite so literal about it right and so the way that that

[00:46:12] happens is through trees through the forest and so you get these long descriptions of characters just wandering through forests in Tokyo and parks and having the sense of a of a presence this there's

[00:46:30] this word in Japanese kai which is a very common word it can just mean a trace or a kind of presence or a sense of something but this word keep kept popping up right kai kai kai like they're walking

[00:46:45] 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 and I started thinking about this

[00:47:00] word kai right and I was able to find some interesting sort of theoretical writing about this term and the kai in kai is the same word as k which English speakers probably no better from the Chinese

[00:47:22] key right so if you've heard of Qi right this sort of cosmic energy right that's this word key but it's also a homonym in Japanese for tree and so there is some speculation that very notion of

[00:47:36] key sort of runs throughout this idea of of Qi or spirit and trees right and so you got to think you know Hania Utaka is writing in the you know aftermath of the war this is a war where spirituality

[00:47:54] 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

[00:48:11] 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 ghost and

[00:48:29] the the loss and the death that that 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

[00:48:43] 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

[00:48:58] that connect the world of living to the world of the dead and I'm like there's got it you know that it's it's so fascinating to me that in 1946 this very prominent literary author is thinking

[00:49:09] about trees in this way right as a kind of medium and then in the 1970s and 80s we have this pseudo scientist if you will right who's arguing something similar and then I just kind of stumbled

[00:49:25] upon an interview that Hashimoto I'm sorry that Hania the writer of dead spirits was giving 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 like like they don't mention

[00:49:45] the secret life of plants by name but they talk about experiments with plants and playing the music and help plants prefer classical music and how airport noise causes weeds to grow because awakens the seeds like these are all directly things from the secret life of plants and so

[00:50:06] I was like okay there is some kind of very unexpected lineage here right and so that's what that chapter is is 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

[00:50:29] of a northeastern Japan a novel where the writer is envisioning a deceased DJ who is broadcasting a radio show out to the living in the dead after after that tsunami and he's doing it from the top of a tree

[00:50:51] right so this this tree becomes like a radio broadcasting tower so once again it's this medium right it's this medium that's connecting the living in the dead. Yeah and I guess going from fiction to the to the living another something that you've written about also are the witnessed

[00:51:17] trees of Hiroshima and can you talk a little bit about these these trees and the field guide. Yeah so this is an article that I wrote for a special issue of the journal in Jalaphi that was about nonhuman witness thing basically right witnessing in the Anthropocene and thinking

[00:51:43] about what it mean to be a witness but not be human and so that got me thinking about what they call the Hibakuzu Hibakuzu Muku which are the trees that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is a sort of phenomenon these trees you know

[00:52:04] 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 the absolute destruction of Hiroshima would would see these trees that survived and you know

[00:52:23] the following spring when they sprouted new leaves that gave them hope right so there are a lot of I guess you could call them feel good kind of stories right but I became really interested in

[00:52:36] thinking about testimony and what what how can we understand the very sort of material survival and the way that these trees damage is inscribed into their flash right into their bar.

[00:52:53] How do we understand not just the sort of human testimony in relation to the trees but you know what is the testimony itself and so there is a book a really wonderful book by Michael Martyr which

[00:53:07] Michael Martyr is somebody who's quite well known within the world of critical plant studies in 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 Urbarium. They are these short pieces that are

[00:53:28] autobiographical in some cases 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 a nice tondor and these are photographs right so they're

[00:53:54] not photographs they're used you know as uses photos sensitive paper to make a kind of imprint of actual plants that were grown in the nuclear exclusion zone in Chernobyl and so it's

[00:54:07] 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's not very well known

[00:54:23] name Sugihata Diakol and she wrote this book called Pilgrimage to the Abam to Trees and it's literally a book of maps and photographs and reflections on all of the different trees in Hiroshima

[00:54:39] that are still alive that's survived the atomic bomb and so I was trying to think about these two texts side by side and so so it became a really interesting article for me to

[00:54:51] 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. There's kind of resonances between yeah what what these

[00:55:03] texts were we're saying about trees and so yeah I had the great opportunity to make a trip to Hiroshima and to visit the trees and it's I mean it's amazing they're they're all cataloged

[00:55:17] they have numbers they have little plaques by all of them and you can yeah very much just go and visit them and it's quite an experience to stand in front of these trees and kind of reflect on

[00:55:30] 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 make pilgrimage to this tree to connect to a different

[00:55:49] era different time period different part of history to people who have lived before trees are these monuments right in North America to being in the experience of a larger old tree is very

[00:56:02] spiritual can you tell me about this tree it's another chapter of your your book I believe so this will actually be a chapter for a collected volume so won't be a part of the book but it will

[00:56:19] be it's it's own chapter in a volume that I don't quite know when it's coming out yet it'll be still still a ways off but it's a book that's about large old trees and that'll come out through

[00:56:34] springer so yeah so the tree that we're talking about here is the jolmone sokii sokii being the Japanese seeder jolmone referring to essentially prehistoric Japan so it's this time period before recorded history the reason it's called that is the common belief right the sort of like

[00:56:57] conventional claim about this tree is that it's over 7,000 years old right 7,200 years old is the number you get seen pastor round and and the chapter gets into why this was a claim that was made

[00:57:12] well it was it was promoted through an effort to increase tourism to the so it's on a it's on a it's on a relatively small island called yaku shima it's been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site

[00:57:25] which has been something of a double inch sword for the residents of the island on email fans out there or Miyazaki studio jibli fans right if you've seen Princess Mononoke the forest of Princess Mononoke are

[00:57:40] somewhat inspired based on these forests on yaku shima so there is this very old tree the 7,000 number you know actual scientists will tell you they will tell you this is this is not this is

[00:57:55] lightly not the case and the person who made that estimate his estimate his his methodology was a little suspect the chapter that I wrote is looking at the different sort of literary the way

[00:58:11] that it the tree appears in literature so it's not saying 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

[00:58:23] predates you know 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 this long literary history right that that talks about this tree so really everything that's been written about this tree

[00:58:49] you know it 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

[00:59:05] and so that's a very interesting tension that I found in these works but also I think because it does have this sort of mysterious aura because it's so old it's also a tree that pops up a

[00:59:20] lot in science fiction in anacene 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

[00:59:36] kind of in a similar way to something like stone hench for example right stone hench being this monument like you mentioned but that we don't know everything about but we know it's old

[00:59:49] but just imagine the what if stone hench was actually alive right it would even more sort of beguiling and invite a lot of speculation and we've mentioned it a few times already but I guess

[01:00:02] can you introduce the monograph the work that you are working on is that something you can speak about yeah I can yeah I can speak about it it's it's nearing completion right academic publishing

[01:00:15] 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

[01:00:28] 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

[01:00:41] but it is a book that kind of deals with a lot of things we've already been talking about but the central premise is it looks at I think a kind of unlikely constellation of writers

[01:00:54] and filmmakers in Japan's modern period that are thinking about plants and very interesting ways the 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

[01:01:14] different moments of crisis in modern Japanese history by imagining what it could mean to be more plant-like it's so there's there's a phenomenon logical aspect to that right where you see some writers like actually getting into what what would it feel like to to be a plant right

[01:01:33] there's more sort of philosophical takes on that I mentioned hitomi right talking about plants as if they're a her own flesh and blood and a part of her family so yeah so that's that's sort of the

[01:01:46] central conceit of the book the title will either be rethinking plants botanical imagination in modern Japan or it'll be botanical imagination rethinking plants in modern Japan 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

[01:02:10] 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

[01:02:21] thing about plants is people have an in right I think there are so many people interested in plants and plant studies and in plants and Japan right that I really tried to write this book in a

[01:02:35] manner that was going to be accessible to a wider readership yeah thank you and in the central I well I don't know if it's the central concept but um phytoomorphism that's the the language

[01:02:52] that you're using to talk about becoming botanical or is that something different yeah no absolutely yeah so phytoomorphism is a term that I've used 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 phytoomorphism

[01:03:16] is my sort of intervention into the conversation about anthropomorphism right so phytoomorphism anthropomorphism one of the things that happens a lot in the world of critical plant studies is a kind of dismissal right of well this is just anthropomorphism anytime you want to think about plants

[01:03:43] in in humanistic ways like you're just you're just engaging in anthropomorphism right and there are very 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] about non-human you know in in more critical and ethical ways but certainly right there is a kind of anthropocentric bias if you're just applying human values and capacities to more than human beings

[01:04:22] 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 right the

[01:04:38] ascribing of plant-like characteristics to the human right it it just switches the directionality of that sort of metaphorical move the other way around and and I do think anthropomorphism in a way

[01:04:52] allows for that right it creates this bridge that then stays open for you know the the plant like ways of being to see back into the way we think about ourselves and so one of the texts that I write

[01:05:07] about in the book is this really fascinating novella from the 1930s called wandering in the realm of the seventh sense by this this modernist woman writer Ozaki Midoori and one of the plot points of this novella is there's a character who is conducting botanical

[01:05:39] 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

[01:05:52] of anthropomorphism you know this is just silly experimental writing you know this is not serious but if you actually read the text and you engage with scientific writing in Japan at the time you realize actually there was a conversation around love in plants right this was an operative

[01:06:20] term with in 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 isn't inheritance from plants in deep evolutionary time right so it's not that

[01:06:41] insane plants you know moss in this case falls in love is us anthropomorphizing moss to acknowledge that humans are self-sfallen love this is a phytomorphic gesture right this is saying we have this plant like the past it does right this is at least how the novella is

[01:06:57] spraying it let's plant it at first didn't they yeah I'm fit at first yeah we are actually in touch with the planty side of ourselves when we fall in love right so that that's sort of thinking

[01:07:12] right that's sort of phytomorphic gestures is just fascinating to me because it has all kinds of implications for what it means to humans wow just brought a big smile to my face thinking about

[01:07:26] the millions and the years where plants just love John Earth you know I tend to get very excited when talking about this stuff and you know I think that's that's been the real kind of gift to me

[01:07:46] 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] that was my conversation with Dr. John Pitt thank you for listening and thank you to John for sharing his work plank kingdom is hosted and produced by me Katherine Paltz and our music is by Carl

[01:08:23] Diner listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our website at plankkingdom.earth