I was born in the Japanese countryside, a place of heavy snowfalls and long winters where traditional culture and wisdom of self-sufficiency still exists.

I remember the first time my father used a mercury-based weed killer on his rice field. I was only 12. All living creatures (frogs, water shrimps, dragonflies, etc) were wiped out. This event impacted me strongly, and I started questioning what had happened, which led me to research about health and environment later in life.

Healing became one of my passions (www.asay.biz). In 2012, I studied the medicinal quality of mushrooms. When I move to Samford in 2017 I finally had the necessary space to grow them, so I bought a few kits, friends shared their mycelium collections, and I started making myceliated grain.

When I was in Japan in August 2019, I dreamt that the buckets I inoculated before to go started fruiting. When I went back home they indeed had fruited but dried out. I felt so sorry, that I was not present to take care of them. They tried to let me know because we had made a connection and created a friendship. This is how I realised that cultivating mushrooms is forming interrelationship with different species.

I am humbly here to learn about nature through the Fungi world and trying to function as a bridge between nature and society. So I decided to name the project “Heart of Mushroom” because of how I connect with them – with the heart.