Office Rice Paddy Turns Tokyo Salarymen into Urban Farmers | Popular Science

Office Rice Paddy Turns Tokyo Salarymen into Urban Farmers | Popular Science

Office workers in Japan are adding some rural relaxation, if you can call it that, to their usual workaday routines. In Tokyo’s bustling business hub of Otemachi, a 1,000-square-foot indoor rice paddy is providing office workers a way to get back to their horticultural roots – and 100 pounds of rice for the building’s cafeteria. That’s actually kind of a big deal for a country that grows only half of the food it requires.

The rice paddy is an experimental effort to get city-dwellers more interested in farming, but also to provide office workers with a rural respite from their crowded urban environs. It also aims to teach skills that have been lost even in Japan’s countryside, where many agricultural tasks have been taken over by machinery.