"Many Faces of the Mysterious Mushroom" exhibit at INAX, Ginza, Tokyo Japan
My search for wild mushrooms in the green spaces of Tokyo coincides with “The Many Faces of the Mysterious Mushroom”, a free art and science exhibit in the INAX building in the Ginza district. It’s a wonderful little one-room exhibit on the world of mushrooms, with mushroom models, preserved specimens, videos, stamps from around the world, scientific illustrations and info on some of the pioneer mycologists of Japan. All this, for free, on the second floor of a big corporate building in Ginza with uniformed front-desk hostesses who bow and say greetings to you when you enter and leave. It also has one of the most-equipped bathrooms I’ve ever encountered in Japan and that says a lot. Japan has the best bathrooms. Anyhow, I go back to this exhibit with the mushrooms I’ve seen in mind to see if I can get a clue as to what some of them are. Everything’s in Japanese of course and I wakarimasen Japanese.
So among the green spaces of Tokyo includes planters and medians of street trees and shrubs and outside of the supermarket we go to in Otsuka is a planter with these Amanitas sprouting up!
baby Amanitas
baby Amanita
Holy shitsky! I come back in a few hours, and realize I’ve let too many hours pass.
Amanitas in a planter
Amanita under the street light
I don’t know what kind of Amanitas they are but am sure they’re deadly poisonous. But so cool to see them pop out of a dinky planter outside the supermarket.
Amanitas in the planter outside the supermarket. This photo shows the progression from two photos up at almost the same angle.
The supermarket these Amanitas are growing outside of is ironically called Life. If someone were to eat these Amanitas, they might be granted painful death because most mushroom fatalities are attributed to eating Amanitas. The rule is to never eat any mushroom in the wild that you’re not 100% sure about it’s identity. There are so many mushrooms that look alike and identification is difficult as I am learning. I may as well add the disclaimer here that the mushrooms I attempt to identify on this website are educated guesses and that in most cases I am not able to confirm the identity of them. So this website is for entertainment purposes only!
That said, I go back to the Amanita planter again to see how they’re doing and find MUSHROOM DEATH!!!!! The Amanitas have been yanked out and tossed aside. Not only that, there is a political candidate rally take place right in front of the planter on the sidewalk!! This is during the height of the campaign season so things are at a fever pitch with candidate rallies and trucks plying the streets blaring the candidate’s name through loudspeakers. That’s what they blare, the candidate’s name, nothing about the issues or anything of substance.
I quickly bypass the people handing out flyers to assess the mycological damange. I gasp at the carnage. I don’t know if this candidate’s rally folks are responsible for the mushroom deaths but I thereby dubbed them, the Mushroom Killing Party.
