In her novel, Tsing argues that "woodland revitalization groups who" cause "small-scale disturbance might draw both people and forest out of alienation, building a world of overlapping lifeways in which mutualistic transformation, the mode of mycorrhiza, might yet be possible" (Tsing 258).

"By the early 1960s, what had once been peasant forests across central Japan had become sugi and hinoki tree plantations" (260)

"Groups such as Kyoto's Matsutake Crusaders take advantage of the mushroom's allure to make it the symbol for their commitments to renewing the working relations of people and forests" (264).

The 1950s and 1960s saw an unprecedented era of rapid industrialization in Japan.

"Farmers left the country-side behind; rural areas once used for peasant livelihoods became spaces of neglect and abandonment" (260). In addition, Japan's " 'fuel revolution' meant that even remote farmers were using fossil fuels...Thus, the most important uses of the peasant forest disappeared".

"Pine wilt nematodes" began to kill "off most of centrals Japan's red pines" (261).

"[T]he hikikomori is a young person, usually a teenage boy, who shuts himself in his room and refuses face-to-face contact... They isolate themselves through engagement in a world of images that leaves them free from embodied sociality - and mired in a self-made prison" (263)

As Kokki Goto, says " 'When people say 'Things were better in the old days,' what they have in mind, I believe, is the joy of doing things together with many people. We have lost that joy" (261).

Tsing's Arguments: red

Evidence: yellow

"Many of the volunteers were retired people, but there were also students, housewives, and salaried employees willing to give up free weekends" (259)

"The Crusaders do not aim for finished gardens; they work for still-emergent forests, which arrange themselves around the possibilities of tradition-sized disturbance. The satoyama becomes a zone where more-than-human social relations - including their own - have a chance to flourish" (259).

"By the time we arrived" the volunteers "were scattered across the hillside, digging up the roots of the broadleaf trees that had invaded what once had been a hillside of pines" (258).

"No one thinks that matsutake will bring Japan back to its pre-bubble glory. Rather than redemption, matsutake-forest revitalization picks through the heap of alienation" (264).

"There is more involved than helping out peasants-and pines. Satoyama work, volunteers explain, remakes the human spirit" (262).

"They hope their actions might stimulate a latent commons, that is, an eruption of shared assembly, even as they know they can't actually make a commons" (258).

"The satoyama becomes a zone where more-than-human social relations - including their own - have a chance to flourish" (259).