Goats and veggies crop up in urban Tokyo
TOKYO — On what feels like a lazy afternoon, 12 goats and two cows chew on hay as five piglets oink and 20 chickens cluck in the background.
But this is no traditional rural countryside farm with vast empty pastures. The animals are among nearly 60 creatures living on a “farm” right smack in the Otemachi business district just a stone’s throw from the bustling central Tokyo station.
A lift takes you to the Otemachi Bokujyo (“Otemachi Farm”) on the 13th floor of a gleaming skyscraper. You step out into natural light streaming in from floor-to-ceiling windows. Tiny plywood picket fences in the 1,000 sq m space separate the animals from visitors.
Across Japan, city dwellers have been developing quite the green thumb. Urban “citizen farms”, as they are called, grew in size by 36 percent over 10 years, from totaling 641 hectares in 2005 to 877 hectares in 2015, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, or MAFF.
While much of this land has traditionally been greenhouses or fields located in city suburbs, there has been a push toward integrating the oldschool farming concept into the urban landscape — both for commercial and community engagement purposes — by companies across industries from real estate to transport.
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Besides the Otemachi Bokujyo, other examples in Tokyo include a paddy field and a bee farm on rooftops, as well as vegetables being grown for commercial purposes in a high-rise building and beneath train tracks.
The MAFF in 2015 introduced laws to promote and regulate urban agriculture, citing objectives such as food security, landscape greenery and the provision of opportunities for urbanites to engage in agricultural activities.
Already, statistics show that the produce grown in Tokyo itself can feed at least 700,000 people. The landstarved capital, which is larger in area than Singapore, is home to more than 13 million people.
Yet even as rural farming is in decline, going by the newfangled farms and agricultural activities sprouting in the high-rises and empty spaces of highly urban Tokyo, it seems that the old ways of the land are getting a new lease of life — city-style.