While you won't find any virgin forests in Tokyo's Edogawa Ward, you will find hedges -- nearly 30 km of them. Ironically, these strips of greenery were planted to combat the problem of the ward's dearth of other vegetation. These verdant stripes, bordering roads and buildings, are part of a ward-engineered greenery revival project.
"In the rush to develop, greenery was left behind," said Koichi Tamura of the ward's park construction division.
Like much of the metropolis, development has been the ward's dominant theme for the past century. But local governments gradually came to re-evaluate its importance after the economic boom of the 1960s.