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Life in Japan: Why is Tokyo shrinking its green spaces amid a climate emergency?

By David McNeill–

Our family spent 14 months searching for a home in Tokyo, viewing a succession of depressingly cramped, bunker-like and pricey houses. We settled on our beloved Mitaka partly because it seemed relatively lush and was within walking distance of some of West Tokyo’s biggest parks. We discovered that this greening was part of local government policy.

I’ve noticed an unsettling trend, however. Across our neighborhood, houses are being sold as their elderly owners pass away. The houses are torn down and rebuilt and their exuberant gardens paved over. Many plots that once hosted single idiosyncratic homes are being replaced with multiple identikit houses, and not a tree or lawn in sight.

Many urban areas are — far too late — concluding that reducing greenery and concreting over land is a very bad idea. It means not just that cities become hotter but that the ground can’t absorb heavy rain, bringing more flooding. A new report to the London mayor, for example, recommends charging residents who concrete over their gardens.

The report notes that London is already losing about 577 million pounds a year from the effects of heat and that without adaptation (meaning a radical rethink of urban development), about 2% to 3% of London’s GDP is likely to be lost annually by the 2050s. Extreme weather, such as the UK’s record 2022 heatwave, also kills people, often the most vulnerable.

This is but the start. Climate change means extreme life-threatening heat is expected to affect half to three quarters of the world’s population by 2100, according to the World Resources Institute. Some cities, such as Phoenix, Arizona, or New Delhi in India are barely livable as it is. So is it worth pondering if we want to shrink our green spaces.

Tokyo is hardly in the same league as New Delhi, but for how long? For much of the summer, my three kids have been stuck at home because it’s too stifling to play outside. I find it eerie walking through our daytime streets and seeing so few children outside. After 5pm, we take them to play in Nogawa Park in the shade of its beautiful oak and zelkova trees.

Cities all over the world, including London, New York, Shanghai and Los Angeles have embarked on plans to plant millions of trees. Tokyo, too, has published a raft of green initiatives, but developers seem to have the last say. Three controversial redevelopment projects, Jingu Gaien, Hibiya Park and Kasai Marine Park, all reduce tree cover, say critics.

Among the little oases of green in Tokyo are the shrines that dot every neighborhood, but these, too, are threatened by developers. Cash-strapped temples and shrines are putting land up for sale, often to pay for refurbishments. Over 500 shrines nationwide, including 25 in Tokyo, have just disappeared over the last decade, says the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

These are not just anecdotal stories. A new paper by two academics at the University of Tokyo (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1618866724001298) uses satellite imagery to calculate that tree canopy cover in Tokyo shrank by 1.9% from 2013 to 2022. Given the growing climate crisis, and the fact that Tokyo already ranks low in green space (far below London, for example), this is a catastrophic loss.

The highest percentage of tree cover loss occurred in residential areas, say the researchers: single-family houses (39.8%), followed by roads (14.7%), educational and cultural facilities (10.8%), and parks (10.4%). “The main factors responsible for tree cover loss are private housing developments, urban redevelopments, and the removal of trees in parks, along streets, and in educational and cultural facilities.”

It’s important not to underestimate the difficulty of changing enormous complex cities like Tokyo. Many people find taking care of trees and gardens a nuisance. Temples are running out of donors. Local governments have shrinking tax bases. But since most of us now live in such overheating cities, it is our responsibility to question the policy directions they take.

Private financing initiatives, for example, mean that many public parks are being developed with private interests. In practice, this often means green spaces cleared to make way for cafes and convenience stores, as though Tokyo doesn’t have enough of those. As one recent article noted, the wider issue at stake here is about how parks and other public spaces should be managed, “and for whose benefit.”

Why is Tokyo shrinking its green spaces amid a climate emergency? Perhaps it is time we started to act.

PROFILE:

David McNeill was born in the U.K. in 1965, and has Irish nationality. He received a doctorate from Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland and lectured at Liverpool John Moores University, before moving to Japan in 2000. He was a Tokyo correspondent for The Independent and The Economist newspapers. He has been a professor in the Department of English Language, Communication and Cultures at University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo, since April 2020. With Lucy Birmingham, he co-authored the book “Strong in the Rain: Surviving Japan’s Earthquake, Tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster,” published in 2012.

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