Tokyo - Rooftop and underground urban farming lures young Japanese office workers

http://www.cityfarmer.info/tokyo-rooftop-and-underground-urban-farming-lures-young-japanese-office-workers/

TOKYO — Tomohiro Kitazawa makes an unlikely farmer. He works neither under the sun nor in the fields, instead reporting for duty in the bustling heart of Tokyo.

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.

Trying to fire up very old memory circuits here, but iirc, because of a quirk in land use law, as Tokyo and other Japanese cities expanded into the countryside, farms were preserved or grandfathered. This led to a patchwork of suburbs and very small farms. They were trying to reform this in the 80s because it was thought that it kept land scarce and real estate prices artificially high.

So everything old is new again.

nt