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.