MIYASHIRO, Saitama Pref. -- While many Japanese banks are struggling to overcome their tainted image, at least one is enjoying an increasingly favorable reputation.

Indeed, it is free from almost all of the negative factors plaguing other banks. It hasn't suffered from a credit crunch and is willing to lend more, even to those who have failed to repay. Still, its assets are not shrinking but swelling.

But Hana-no-Tane Ginko, or Flower Bank, is no moneylender. It operates just like any other bank except that flower seeds, not money, are its currency of loan and deposit.

With an initial investment of about 20,000 yen to prepare 20 varieties of flower seeds and a shelf to store them, the Miyashiro Town Office founded the bank in July 1996. Some 30 initial customers -- the town's flower lovers -- established accounts.

The number of customers has since increased to 300 and the seed varieties to 62 as of the end of March. In February, the bank opened a branch office within the town's community center of Shinshukan to better serve customers.

In principle, customers are to return what they borrow plus interest. But in reality the rule is basically ignored.

"Many of our customers are beginners in growing flowers and they often fail to gather seeds," said Miho Yokouchi, assistant administrator at Miyashiro Town Office's Life Environment Division.

"In such a case, we would not force them to return them. Instead, we urge them to borrow more seeds and try again," she said.

Her division serves as Flower Bank headquarters, but she admits the bank is rather lax when it comes to bookkeeping.

"We do keep track of who has borrowed how much, but we don't know how much in total we're lending out," Yokouchi said, showing a bundle of notebooks.

But she doubts the bank will run out of seeds because some successful customers return far more than they borrowed and in greater varieties.

Plus, she added, the bank has received free seeds from donors who have heard about the Flower Bank.

Noboru Fujiwara, who was one of the first to open an account at the bank, said it's easy to understand the bank's success.

"When you've done a fine job and gotten good seedlings, more than you need, you want to give some of them to your neighbors," he said. "Then, your neighbors give you different kinds of seedlings or seeds in return. So, you will have lots of seeds in greater varieties to return to the bank."

Fujiwara, who completed a flower planting seminar sponsored by the town office, is an active member of the Flower Club, a voluntary group helping create flower beds in public parks and other vacant lots around town.

Account holder Yaeko Nakamura said she has made many friends through flowers.

"I've always liked flowers and have been growing them in a self-taught way. And I'm far better now thanks to the seminar," she said. "But this is more than just flowers being beautiful. You get to know many people through flowers, eventually, creating something like a human linkage."

That sense of community is exactly what town officials are trying to promote through a series of flower projects.

Of the town's population of 35,000, about 20,000 moved here in the late 1970s when Miyashiro was transformed into a bedroom community for Tokyo.

Back then, large-scale housing developments sprouted up and many people in their 30s and 40s bought houses here.

"Those are the people in the hard-working generation," said Osamu Nakamura, director of Miyashiro Town Office's Life Environment Division. "Now they're retiring both from work and child-rearing, and we want them to make Miyashiro a true hometown."

Despite the inflow of urban workers and the aging agricultural population, Miyashiro has remained a farming area, a feature that both the local government and residents want to retain.

For the past several years, the local government has been promoting policies to maintain farming as the town's core industry and farmland as an indispensable part of the landscape. The idea of Flower Bank, too, was conceived as a means to promote that idea, Nakamura said.

Likewise, a group of local residents have been mobilizing what they call "Ohana Sakase-tai," which literally translates into "Flower Corps."

The first corps, drafted in April 1998, turned a patch of uncultivated land into sunflower fields last summer. And this spring, the same 1.73-hectare plot was filled with rape blossoms by the second corps formed last October.

As in many other rural areas in Japan, the farming population here is quickly aging and more and more farmland is going to waste. But the Flower Corps is trying to change that.

"This is a plain and subdued town with no remarkable features," said Mitsuyuki Tonozuka, a key organizer of the corps. "But we want to keep this town as a place where people can feel at ease and comfortable."

The Flower Corps, which is funded by monthly membership fees of 2,000 yen per person, has borrowed no seeds from the Flower Bank for the past two projects, Tonozuka said, "because we needed too many."

Rather, he said, the corps is more interested in contributing to the bank.

"We failed to get sunflower seeds because of the long rain. But it seems like we'll be successful with those rape blossoms," he said.