From the outside Yukihiko Yoshioka's property could easily be mistaken for a traditional Japanese-style house with a small garden. After all, this is Tokyo's Setagaya Ward, a premier residential neighborhood in central Tokyo, and Yoshioka's property is only a few minutes' walk from the local shopping street, where posh boutiques, cafes and medical clinics line the tiled pavement all the way to Chitose-Karasuyama Station on the Keio Line.
But step inside the fenced property and you feel as if you have wandered into a countryside farm from a few generations ago. Yoshioka's family has practiced rice and vegetable farming for 12 generations, with Yukihiko, a landscape gardener, the 13th in line.
The garden and farm is large, covering 15,000 sq. meters. Between gnarled trees and heaps of chopped-off branches are 43 pigs and 450 chickens roaming about freely, oinking and clucking in the middle of the day. A pile of dark-brown compost — a mixture of pig and chicken dung, protein-rich rice bran and tree branches — sits in the 220-sq.-meter pig pen, with steam wafting up here and there. The compost is fermenting.