Tales of the Runari Episode 1: The Deadliest Blossom
What is the world’s deadliest blossom?
Intro – takenoko digging in Kishiwada
Have you ever been takenoko digging? One morning, 15 odd years ago, I got up early and cycled northeast into the Kishiwada mountains. It was a bit of a cold morning. I was wearing jeans and a blue zip top with British flag designs on it. You cannot buy them back home in England, but in Japan, British products suddenly found some patriotism. The flag sells away from home.
Back to the dig. We hiked up a mountain. Two Americans, a Jamaican who’d set it up with one of her teachers whose family owned the land, and myself. 
We passed trees bearing the bitterest of blood oranges. A single bite imploding my taste buds into a black hole of pain.
The farmer, a kind lady in her 60s, gave us some one-handed flat blade mattocks. The quest, find the fast sprouters of that morning. Bamboo is not like other grasses – it shoots up fast and hard.
The fastest nought to sixty car in the world, is the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170. It can do it in 1.66 seconds. Surely one triple six being a demon and all.
Bamboo is the demon 170 of the grass world. Not only sprouting huge amounts in a short amount of time, but doing it in such a way that if you do not catch it within a few hours, you’d need a saw to cut it, and there is no way you are eating it.
That’s right, we were hunting for edible bamboo roots, otherwise known as takenoko. We needed to catch them early and harvest them fast. But it was not like pulling potatoes and carrots out of the ground, not even sawing down saplings to stop trees overcrowding. It involved hacking at the roots, digging around them with the mattocks, and a lot of wiggling.
Oh and nearly getting hit in the face by a Jamaican backswing.
By the end of it, we stood triumphant on the mountainside with dozens of takenoko. A good harvest for our kind host, who rewarded us with bitter oranges…
The Deadliest Blossom
When you hear the term “the deadliest blossom” your mind might take you to something like a venus fly trap capturing flies or belladonna with her dainty purple petals and its juicy blackberries – otherwise known as deadly nightshade.
And it is deadly…
blurred vision, a rash, headaches, slurred speech, hallucinations, convulsions and eventually death.
Then there is Arali, otherwise known as Angel’s Trumpet which can cause paralysis, hallucinations, and death if eaten. Or Aconitum, better known as Monkshood and Wolf’s Bane which causes vomiting, dizziness, headaches, and can lead to comas and death.
Even daffodils. Our beautiful, springtime flowers which adorn many a garden and meadow in England. Their flowers are poisonous to dogs.
But it’s not about the potency of one flower which makes something deadly. If the most poisonous flower in the world lived on Venus it would hold us in no fear for we cannot get there to face it.
This reminds me of a class I used to teach in Osaka around the time of the kinoko digging adventure.
It was entitled “The Top 10 Deadliest Animals in Australia.” Now, I’m pulling this from memory but there were snakes – the brown snake, taipan, a number of deadly spiders, spine fish, sharks, jellyfish, crocodiles, and so on.
Now, in the 15 odd years since I last taught this, the list has changed a bit. But here is the top ten out of order.
- The Common Death Adder
- Coastal Taipan snake – its venom kills within 45 minutes
- Blue-ringed octopus – contains enough poison to kill 26 adults and will paraylse you within minutes.
- Sydney funnel-web spider
- Crocodiles – the most likely animal to eat a human.
- Eastern brown snake – the snake which kills the most humans
- Bull shark
- Irukandji jellyfish
- Honey bee – 100 stings or one if you are allergic will kill.
- Box jellyfish
From what I remember, the honey bee has forced out the spine fish from the top 10.
After introducing them, the students had to rank the animals from least kills per year to most. Of course, top spot almost always went to crocs, sharks, or the taipan. However, they were wrong. Such attacks are rare and usually on land or close to land, so medical assistance is available.
The deadliest was the jellyfish – the box jellyfish, is the deadliest because a person stung by it usually dies before they can get to the shore and get help. The same goes with the octopus or the irukandji and the spine fish.
Now this is all from the fuzzy dregs of my memory, but it makes the point.
Furthermore, when we think of deadliest, to whom? Well, as humans we naturally think of ourselves and possibly other animals which might touch, consume, or be attacked by something.
Day of the Triffids this is not.
Let me venture that bamboo is the deadliest blossom.
The Tallest Grass in the World
There are over 1,642 known species of bamboo, from 88 genera, in the world spread between the Andes and the Kuril Islands – hot and cold lands alike. Of these, one hundred of them are native to Japan, and of those, seven or eight are regularly cooked and eaten.
The most common types of bamboo in Japan are madake, mousochiku, and hachiku.
Madake grows up to 20 metres in height and 14 centimetres thick. This one is easy to cut and peel, so is often used for bamboo crafts.
Mousochiku is the tallest bamboo in Japan, growing up to 25 metres tall and 25 centimetres thick. It feels a little fuzzy on the outside and is easy to spot because of its purple-brown spots.
Hachiku is considered the quintessential and original Japanese bamboo, one which is native to the islands since prehistoric times.
These are known as giant timber bamboos because of their commercial uses, but also as running bamboos as their rhizomes extend horizontally over long distances. They are hardy grasses which can withstand Japan’s hot summers and cold winters – better than me, anyway – I spend half of the year yearning for autumn and half of the year yearning for spring.
Another type of bamboo, Black Henon, is often split into small strips and used to make tea whisks. Any matcha connoisseur will have one. Mine probably needs replacing as it is getting stiffer and more fragile.
Bamboo is used in many aspects of life in Japan. Here are a few examples:
Bundling and weaving bamboo strands into various kinds of art. Or cubed into chikuno cubes used as bamboo deodorizers and humidity controllers. Weaved together to make baskets, colanders, brooms, umbrellas, chopsticks, and for fishing rods and tackle. Or used in house construction, garden fences, and temple fences. Bamboo is integral to architecture in Kyoto for both sukiya-style buildings and for making komayose barriers for machiya houses.
Globally, bamboo covered approximately 35 million hectares of land and was worth almost 72 billion US dollars in 2023. This is projected to grow to 92 billion by 2027.
Prior to the mass use of concrete which has hammered coastlines and riverbanks all across Japan, and coated mountain sides in an all dominating desire to prevent disasters which so afflict these islands, feudal lords would plant bamboo groves along riverbanks in order to help prevent flooding.
Kadomatsu new year decorations are made and used by families all over Japan. They are made of bamboo and pine.
Even the music of Japan depends on bamboo in many ways – the shakuhachi flute is not only made from bamboo, but is a key instrument in the development of Japanese musical history.
An aside – the sound of water, hiking Nakayama
There are just some things you can’t Google – well, I can’t. No matter the formulation of my enquiry, I could not get a sensible answer. So, it goes like this. I once heard you can hear the sound of water inside bamboo if you press your ear against it.
Well, once I went on a hike with a dear friend. It was a fairly easy one between two shinto shrines set on either side of the mountain. Within a few minutes of heading up the slope we came across banana trees amidst fallen logs and leaves. Higher up we found an old kofun, a stone cist apparently belonging to the man who inspired the tale of Momo Taro, a mythological boy hero Okayama claims as their own.
Later on, as we went along obscured narrow paths down into dips and back up the other side, past rock formations and smaller barrows, we came across a bamboo grove slightly down the slope from the path. Remembering the factoid I’d heard, I made my way down and pressed my ear against the bamboo and sure enough, I could hear water trickling down. However, my hiking partner could not.
When Bamboo Blooms
As I am sure you know, my smart viewers and listeners, most plants are able to flower then come back the next year. Trees go through a cycle and are able to blossom, usually annually, drop their leaves (except for evergreens) and come back when the climate warms up again.
If I were to describe a bamboo blossom to you, I might use fireworks as an analogy. Perhaps a fitting one given the Japanese term for fireworks, hanabi, literally translates as “fire flowers.”
They are not the bright fireworks or the loud ones. They’re not the ones which fizzle or whine or split apart to smaller explosions later on. These are the background ones – the faint gold ones which barely make a sound. The bamboo’s blossom is both gregarious in its size and abundance of seeds, and muted. They remind me of the dull, almost bronze fireworks which spring up in the background between loud, bright red ones.
One of the great mysteries of bamboo flowerings, however, is why it takes so long.
Most trees and plants flower annually. Naturally, for a monocarpic plant, this does not happen with bamboo. Instead, their flowering cycle runs from three years to a hundred and fifty years.
Yes, one-hundred and fifty years. There are bamboo plants that have never bloomed in our lifetimes, in the lifetimes of our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great grandparents. For us Brits, that means bamboo which last flowered in the Victorian era, in Japan it would be the early years of the Meiji era, and for Americans, just after the Civil War.
Amazing.
Henon bamboo, the one used in matcha tea whisks, flowers every one-hundred and twenty years – before World War One. Someone ask Joe Biden what he thought of it. I am sure he saw it.
And perhaps a greater one, related to this, is how cuttings from the same bamboo plant, no matter the distance or condition variance, will blossom at the exact same time as if there’s a genetic clock set within.
You would imagine, would you not, that when cut apart and separated by miles – tens of miles, hundreds of miles, even thousands, that the bamboo would flower at different times. Or if parts of the same bamboo with different soil conditions, levels of shade, access to water or altitude, would flower at different times, but no. It is as if the flowering time is preprogrammed within the grass at its time of seeding, and growing.
In short, bamboo flowering is spectacular in different ways than sakura or roses, but is also complex and poorly understood. What we do know is that:
- All members of a species or clone will flower simultaneously
- Some species of bamboo will flower in a massive, synchronised way whereas others will have a more sporadic style.
- They are monocarpic.
- They use up most of their energy with this single, reproductive event then die.
Bamboo reproduces by vegetative propagation. That is to say they send up new growths from their underground stems (known as rhizomes). This is an asexual form of reproduction.
However, they also sexually reproduce. This is a real reproduction where a new organism – in this case a bamboo plant, is created. For this, they use flowers and seeds. Some plants and trees are male or female – kiwi trees for example and require them to overlap in order to produce new fruit.
Bamboo are male and female, so there is enough of an overlap between flowering and seeding for bamboo to self-pollinate.
What happens when bamboo blooms?
Ueda Koichiro illustrates the boom or bust nature of explosive bamboo blossoming in his book Take (meaning bamboo) from 1968. He delves into the records of Takayama and Yamagata to look at two sasa blossomings.
The first took place in Takayama in 1833 and coincided with a poor year for rice cultivation. What a boon. Residents were able to harvest the bamboo seeds in huge quantities – five million of them which they turned into dumplings, noodles, and gruel.
Later, in 1855, the residents of Yamagata experienced their own sasa blossoming. I do not know what kind of rice year it was, but it turned out pretty horrible in the end. You see, the bamboo blossom attracted hordes of rats – an inundation of them. They consumed the seeds then moved onto other crops forcing the local residents to capture and kill said rodents. In the end, they caught 350,000 of them.
Yet, it is not the rats which make this the deadliest blossom.
No, the victim, so to speak, of the deadliness is not something external – it is no rat or human, no neighbouring plant or ignorant herbivore, but the bamboo plant itself.
The Deadliest Blossom
However, some plants are what we call monocarpic. This is a Greek amalgam of mono (one or once) and karpos (fruit). By the way, on a fruity tangent – the word fruit is a French word. So what is the English word for fruit? It’s apple. Just as deer used to mean any wild beast, now it means deer whereas apples used to mean any old fruit now they just mean apples. Classic examples of linguistic niching down I guess.
A monocarpic plant will blossom once then die when its fruit drops. It is that moment where someone has been slowly fading away from illness or injury, but rallies at the last moment, expending all the energy they have on having one good day then they pass on. Same for these plants, they pour all of their energy reserves into beautiful flowers and growing their seeds/fruits, and once done, wither away and die.
Some examples of monocarpic plants include aloe – I once ate aloe vera sashimi in Okinawa and it was delicious, you also get it in yoghurts here. Yum. Other examples include other succulents, pineapples, puya, gymea lilies, agave, and vegetables such as carrots, broccoli, radishes, mustard, and cauliflower.
And of course, the focus of this podcast, the bamboo.
Most, though admittedly not all, bamboo species will wither and die within a short time, less than a year, maybe less than half. As the plant dies off after flowering, a new one will grow from a seed to replace it.
It can take up to six months for bamboo seeds to sprout, and when they do, despite growing explosively at first, a bamboo will take 60 days to reach full height and be harvestable. Therefore, it can take up to two-thirds of a year for bamboo to come back and be harvestable again.
Furthermore, bamboo seeds have a low germination rate and their seeds struggle to compete with other plants. An example of why this is, is due to a lack of maternal bamboo providing nutrients.
This takes me on another fun detour. Have you read “The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben. A fantastic tome all about trees from a man who cultivated them in the Alps all his life. The roots of trees not only dig down deep into the earth – now I feel like Treebeard – Tolkien’s tree herder, but those roots connect together via fungal pathways, so trees – even of different species, can share nutrients.
By having the parent bamboo cluster die, the new seeds trying to sprout and grow, cannot gain this kind of assistance. Though, I do wonder how true this is because the parent does not die immediately. There is a year or two where the plant is dying slowly for it to give sustenance to any seedling. Plus its dead body could provide some nutrition, perhaps. We just do not know why this is the case.
As a result, the widespread death of bamboo, after flowering, has a major economic impact on farmers who depend on it. Due to the local nature of bamboo flowering and mass death, this is a local impact rather than a national or global one. In China, this can, for example, also affect pandas who may starve from a lack of food.
For bamboo farmers, it is important to diversify the bamboo they grow. This does not necessarily mean different species, but growing different organisms of the same bamboo species. If, for example, 12 bamboo farmers farmed 12 different bamboo plants, then one would suffer a major economic hit if their plant died. But if they cut each one into 12 portions and shared them between them, then they would regularly – depending on the species of bamboo, suffer a 1/12th economic hit, but would not lose everything.
This is why I believe bamboo is the deadliest blossom. When it comes, it signals the death of an entire plant, wherever its cuttings are. It affects the ecosystem and the economy of a local area or a particular farmer, and it can signal mass rat infestations. Yet, the blossoms bring life too, and they have helped sustain people suffering other kinds of famines. Life is pretty beautiful, isn’t it?
Outro – heading home
Back to takenoko harvesting in Kishiwada…
Once we’d finished digging for bamboo roots, our host presented each of us with three bamboo roots in plastic bags. She then instructed us on the six hour boiling and stewing process.
To be honest, at the time, I could not be bothered with all that, but I now had three big bamboo roots on me. What to do? Well, two of them went to random elderly ladies I met on the way home – who were very happy to receive them, and the final one went to the mother of a Japanese friend who lived in my neighbourhood. Hopefully they could make better use of them than I would have.
Often, takenoko are boiled with rice bran to remove impurities, and to soften the tough guys up, then simmered, sliced, sauteed and stewed – and probably more. There’s even a restaurant in Kyoto called Uoka which offers an eleven course meal with each dish involving takenoko somehow.
One recommended takenoko recipe is takenoko no nimono. This requires bamboo shoots – of course, water, dried bonito flakes, soy sauce, mirin, a little sake, sugar, and a dash of salt.
Cut the bamboo in half and rinse with cold water – remove those white, gritty residues. Now slice them up into medium sized pieces. Now boil some water in a pot – add in the dried bonito flakes and make a bonito stock or dashi. Keep at a medium-high heat for five minutes. Now turn off the heat and let the bonito sink to the bottom. It should take five more minutes.
Strain the bonito flakes out of the soup and pour it back into the pot. Make sure there are no flakes remaining. Add in the bamboo shoots and bring to a gentle boil for 20 minutes. Then add soy sauce, sake, mirin, sugar and simmer for five more minutes or until the simmering liquid has gone. Add salt and a few more bonito flakes and toss together.
Enjoy.
As Goto Miyako wrote in one of her tanka:
The delicate taste
Of bamboo shoots born today
Seasoned softly, yes
This is the taste of Japan.
Next Time on the Tales of the Runari…
In episode three I look into the double empathy problem – a subject close to my heart. For decades it was supposed that people on the autism spectrum, formerly either autism or Asperger’s, lacked empathy. But what if, so-called normal people are just unable to read or understand autistic empathy. Have the wires been crossed? How does this affect cross-cultural understanding, and what if we met aliens? Tune in next time to find out.
