Hello, I doubt I’ll get much of a reply here, but figured I would try anyways.
I am in Japan for a couple of years, in the Tokyo area and am looking for a mycology community to learn more about mushrooms and mycology in general. I don’t speak any Japanese, but am hoping there might be a bilingual community here?
I am new to the world of mushrooms and mycology, but would love to learn about DNA sequencing and be able to more accurately identify mushrooms. I know in the U.S. many big cities have a “biohacking” facility with access to some basic lab equipment which would be great, but any type of mycology or mushroom community would be nice to join as I am really new to this and could learn a lot regardless.
Anyways, I would appreciate it if anyone has any info or can possibly point me in the right direction. Thanks!
I don’t have any answers for you, but I would like to say that this is a good question! I hope you have some luck. There are some pretty interesting fungi in Japan!
I’d say if you can find any field guides to mushrooms in Japan, that would be a good place to start, even just to get more aquainted with mycology. I’d imagine there are also some good YouTube mycology/foraging channels that may showcase some content you’d be interested, in regards to the region.
If you are a complete beginner to mycology in general, I’d recommend literature and online rescources that really aren’t specific to any region, that way you get a good sense of what the real fundamentals are (i.e. different habitats, gills/pores, saprotrophic or mycorrhizal ecology, basic identification, etc.) Mushlove :)
I spent a few days in Japan, and I posted some mushroom observations on iNaturalist. I was amazed by how quickly they were identified!
It turns out there’s a thriving mycology community who use iNaturalist in Japan. They don’t speak much English, but they are friendly and enthusiastic!
Start posting observations — it’s a great way to connect with them! Happy mushroom hunting!
Thanks for the tips. And although I am a beginner, I have some of the basic knowledge thanks to trying to grow some mushrooms from petri dishes and going down some rabbit-holes online. But of course my knowledge likely only scratches the surface compared to the biologists and mycologists. I have looked for some books and the tough part is that most that I have seen are in Japanese. Maybe it will b worth it to get a non regional book just to get a little more of the fundamentals down, like being able to narrow it down to genus?
Anyways, thanks for the ideas and encouragement!
Thanks for the reply, and yes there seems to be one person here that is always suggesting IDs on my observations, and has been quick to answer some of my questions about identification (in English). I thought about reaching out to him personally to see if he had any knowledge about an in person community, but being fairly new to inaturalist I wasn’t sure the etiquette of reaching out to people directly in the he platform.
Thanks for the reply, I will continue to try and go out and make observations.
The hard part with mushrooms is that it seems it is really hard to make an actual identification on many species without lab work (for what I could tell) this is what lead me to wanting to find a community that may have access to these tools.
