Tokyo Scenes Shocking for their Simplicity

This scene may shock and amaze you, but I took this in Todoroki which is in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo. Yep. Right smack dab in the 23 wards of Tokyo, you can still find land that is being farmed.

These little gems seem to be disappearing though. More condos seem to be popping up everywhere.


Some of the gardens or hatake are community owned or a group pitching in together to pay for the land. Any time I see someone working on this type of property, they look to be about sixty years old. I've been too shy to talk to them, but I should get over that. I wonder if they have always farmed or if it is a retirement thing.

In the same area I found another hatake of hakusai. A kind of cabbage... savoy, maybe? It's pretty tasty but doesn't look like much sitting in the field like this.

Todoroki is on the Oimachi train line. While it doesn't connect to the Yamanote line (the main line that circles around central Tokyo and stops at the many central districts) it takes about 15 minutes to get to Todoroki station from Shibuya.

Maybe this is what I love about Tokyo. Shibuya is bright, loud and a mecca for the young. Get on a train, transfer two times and fifteen minutes later, you're in a area with more houses than apartments, hardly a neon sign to be seen and little gems of farmland tucked away in various spots.

This gives a little more context to how these tiny plots of farming fit into the city scape. For this plot, I liked how they do the same thing as in the country... You can take vegetables from this field as long as you leave a donation in the box.