Tokyoites go farming to escape urban woes

As Japan's capital city struggles with problems from food safety to global warming to unemployment, a growing number of people in the famously crowded metropolis are becoming city farmers, planting crops atop tall buildings or deep underground.

 

Kitazawa, 31, arrives for work in Tokyo's financial district of Otemachi in a heavy-duty silver elevator. What was once a bank's underground vault has been transformed into a subterranean world of greenery and warm, moist air.

Kitazawa was one of many young people here left without a stable income as Japanese companies slashed jobs. But he finally ended years of job hunting when he found the position growing vegetables right in the middle of Tokyo.

 

"I felt a bit odd at first growing vegetables like this, but I've learned its merits," Kitazawa said.

 

The state-of-the art farm, known as Pasona O2, was created by Tokyo-based temp staffing agency Pasona Group Inc. The farm carefully adjusts temperatures, humidity and lighting so vegetables can grow under the ground.

Kitazawa grows a few different types of lettuce in one of the six "farms," which look somewhat like space laboratories divided by glass doors that slide open and shut automatically.

 

The other farming rooms grow vegetables such as tomatoes and pumpkins.

 

"We want to activate Japan's agricultural sector by dispatching enthusiastic young people," said Sayaka Itami, leader of Pasona's new business development division.

"By creating this new style of farm, which is bright and clean, in the middle of Tokyo, we want to draw young people's interest into farming," she said.

She said that urban farming helped her company by creating a new source of jobs.

 

City farming also offers a solution for another problem in Tokyo and other major cities -- the so-called urban heat-island effect.

Cities' temperatures rise in the summer due to the urban environment of heat-absorbing concrete buildings and pavement. In a vicious cycle, the heat boosts the use of air conditioning, raising carbon emissions blamed for global warming.