For Urban Farming Wisdom, Look to Japan

Photo by Azby Brown

Efficient use of vertical space

By Azby Brown, the director of the KIT Future Design Institute in Tokyo, is the author of Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan.
The Atlantic
June 10, 2010

Excerpt:

My neighbors are farmers. They regularly bring us cabbages, cucumbers, bitter melon, tomatoes, eggplants, persimmons, and other local specialties, and their arrival on our doorstep with a box of fresh-picked produce is as much an announcement of the changing seasons as the color of the sky or warmth of the wind. Our conversations often turn to rain, mulch, tools for tilling, and fruit yields from the old but still-productive trees they tend. They offer advice on reviving my stunted tomatoes, and we debate the relative merits of baseball caps for working the fields under the hot sun as opposed to the traditional straw kasa.

None of this would be remarkable except that we live in the middle of Yokohama, a progressive city of 3.6 million people, and our houses are so densely packed that they almost touch. My neighbors are Japanese urban farmers, and have been for decades.

Urban development in Japan often leaves small farm plots, rice fields, and other rural features intact while houses and apartments spring up all around them. When American housing developments are built on farmland, nothing of the farm remains. The land is bulldozed and flattened in large multi-acre chunks, the ground cover scraped away to be re-sodded later, new drainage and roadways built. In contrast, the Japanese pattern is generally more piecemeal, old households remaining in place while new dwellings are erected on selected plots.

The farmers in my neighborhood belong to families that, like my Japanese in-laws, have been here for generations. They are mostly elderly now, but the group includes a few younger men who discovered a knack for growing vegetables early on and have temperaments that compel them to do it. Their farming is something deep and rich—an anchor to the land, and a means of reinforcing social bonds. When Masahiro shows up unannounced clutching a bag of persimmons in his calloused hands, saying almost apologetically, “Oh, we picked a lot this year, you’d be doing us a favor by taking some,” we feel like we’ve received a sincere gesture of regard, the fruit of the actual labor of his family.

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