From the outside, Minamisawa Steiner Hoshi-no-ko Kodomo-en kindergarten looks much like any other home-run preschool. The two-story house is approached from a quiet side street, and you enter through a garden gate.

Still, there are clear signs that this kindergarten marches to its own quiet drum. The small garden has no manufactured playground equipment. Instead, homemade or recycled items are neatly arranged in the yard: thick-cut logs, clean wooden buckets, a tall stack of pots and pans, and clunky pine stilts designed for tiny legs.

Inside the school, the differences are just as pronounced and a woodsy feeling prevails. There are oak tables and little oak chairs, hand-crafted shelves made by parents, rattan baskets in all sizes and paper globe lanterns instead of the usual fluorescent lights. Toys are made of wood and bamboo, and there is not a plastic or machine-manufactured toy in sight.

The influence of Rudolf Steiner, a prolific author, teacher and spiritual philosopher from Germany, can be seen throughout the school. Steiner devised an educational system covering the years from nursery school through high school that he first put to use in the 1920s in a working-class section of Stuttgart. During a child's earliest years, through age 7, he emphasized the importance of stimulating the imagination and encouraging physical exploration of the world via arts and crafts, storytelling and free play with toys, as opposed to reading and writing.

A typical day at Minamisawa begins at 8:45 a.m. The kindergarten's 25 children, aged 3 to 6, spend the first part of the morning playing together freely in the house. This is followed by "circle time," with songs, poems and eurythmy (movement with song). After lunch comes a free-play period in the garden, at the nearby shrine or on the riverbanks. A story or puppet show ends the day before the children go home at 1:15 p.m.

Sitting on a sturdy child's stool, Hajime Kira, the kindergarten's founding teacher, demonstrates for parents a typical activity at the school.

Using his body, rather than his voice for instruction, he calmly wraps and knots a handful of wool to approximate the human body. "A child fills in the face with her own eyes and nose and mouth," he explains.

Parents are initiated in the Steiner philosophy through 11/2-hour creative, hands-on activities offered twice a month.

Steiner's philosophy teaches that young children are particularly sensitive, and that sensations and impressions influence the human body as it matures as well as during the adult years. Until a child is 7, children ought to learn primarily through gentle experiences, whether it be touching, feeling, listening, seeing, hearing or eating.

"Steiner noticed that young children are very sensitive to loud impressions. That is why we don't use CDs or recorded music, loud colors or toys. Even a piano is too strong for most children," says Kira.

At the Minamisawa school, the walls have been papered in a soft pink and there are very few other colors.

"Pink is a very warm color. This color wraps children in a feeling of peacefulness," Kira explains.

A small place to admire nature has been set up on a table by the window. In late autumn, the display featured pumpkins, chrysanthemums, cotton bolls still clinging to their branches, dried leaves and a woolly gnome.

For those of us used to walking into children's classrooms pulsating with loud colors and cartoonish figures, the effect of such understated beauty can be confusing. When the unnatural has become the norm, the natural looks abnormal.

Along the back wall of this open-plan classroom is a kitchen. The children participate in making their own lunch twice a week. On Mondays, it's a rich o-kayu made from genmai, barley and millet. On Fridays, it's a hearty soup and bread. The other three days, children bring o-bento from home.

"We try to use good natural and organic ingredients as much as possible. But we don't abide by a strict dietary philosophy," Kira explains.

Steiner's back-to-nature ideas inspire many parents to provide an at-home environment that is as much as possible a natural extension of the Steiner kindergarten experience. Other parents chose to send their children to the school precisely because the education it offers is already in alignment with the way they are raising their children at home.

"We don't watch television here or at home. When children see a television on, they stop playing. If you observe a 3-year-old watching television, the whole body freezes in front of the TV. It's a totally unnatural position for a child to be in," says one parent.

The kindergarten is modeled on a family environment, with children of all ages mixing together and the older kids learning to take care of the younger ones.

Parents, however, aren't permitted to enter a class in session: Children become distracted if their mother or father is around. But they are often near by, as the Steiner kindergarten method rejects the role of principal in favor of making the parental community responsible for all major decisions. An upstairs room at Minamisawa is set aside for parents, where they can make things for the kindergarten and for bazaars, and hold meetings.

Kira chose to locate the kindergarten in Higashi-Kurume, where he spent his own childhood. He opened Minamisawa in 1995, after working at a Christian preschool from 1985 to 1988 and studying Steiner's educational philosophy in Germany from 1988 to 1992.

There are currently more than 1,500 Steiner kindergartens around the world. Japan has some 20-30 Steiner-influenced kindergartens, but only five, including Minamisawa, are members of the international Association of Waldorf Kindergartens, the official educational body for Steiner kindergartens.

In recent years, the translation of Steiner teaching materials into Japanese has raised the system's profile in Japan and increased demand for Steiner kindergartens. Minamisawa, far from the center of Tokyo, still draws parents up and down the Seibu Ikebukuro Line, and it's not unusual for parents to sign a child up from birth.