Many seniors of Lovers of Niiharu told me there is a book written by a retired city official who was actually in charge of the establishment of Niiharu Citizen Forest. But, as usual, not many people remembered the title. It took about 6 months for me to figure out which book it is. One weekend in May, I finally met it in one of the city libraries. Its title is “The Story of Making SatoyamaPark and Citizen Forest: Yokohama Maioka Park and Niiharu Citizen Forest,” written by Yoshikazu Asaba浅羽良和（あさばよしかず）「里山公園と『市民の森』づくりの物語」. (Tokyo: Haru-shoboh はる書房, September 2003, ISBN 4-89984-042-X) To know how the frontline of the City approached for Citizen Forest scheme, the book is very informative. Mr. Asaba started his working life as a landscaping architect for the city of Yokohama in 1963 and retired in March 31, 2000, 5 days after Niiharu joined the Citizen Forest Family. He stayed in one job for his entire life, to create and conserve greenery in the city of Yokohama. He wrote in 1963 the city office building was a neighbor of many vacant spaces that were occupied by American Occupation Army until recently. Since then, Japan went through rapid economic growth, Yokohama had a population explosion, and the acreage of city park grew from 197 ha in 1963 to 1576 ha in 2000 (; these numbers do not include Citizen Forests or the other conserved greenery). One of Mr. Asaba’s retirement parties was organized by the citizen volunteers who worked with him to establish Maioka Park. The volunteers celebrated his “graduation” by tossing him into the air, i.e. Do-age 胴上げ (; an example is here) … er, it’s difficult to explain … it is the most affectionate way in Japan to applaud somebody’s achievement by a group of people.
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| Satoyama
rice paddies next to Maioka Park in May. They have completed rice planting already. |
When in 1853 Commodore Mathew Perry visited Japan to prize open the closed Japanese door for the Western world, the current downtown area of Yokohama was in the middleof reclamation process of swamps dotted along the coast. Closed Japanese economy constantly required more land for rice cultivation. Nearby Edo (Tokyo)had already 1 million population in 1721. People intended to plant rice along the Yokohama coast. On the other hand, samurais in 1853 did not want to have much contact with foreigners anyway and tried to contain gaijin’s movement without provoking cannons of Commodore Perry. Yokohama’s now-downtown area was a loch surrounded tiny but steep hills, many swamps which were under construction for filling, a sandbank, and rivers. The geography was ideal to lock-up strangers who wanted to stay near Tokyo. Moreover, the land reclamation was completed in 1856 that provided the places for foreigners to build western style buildings, including gardens and parks. The new town for Westerners was born with the first western style gardens /parks in Japan, which is the downtown of Yokohama. Yamate Park was the first Japanese public park built in 1870. Mr. Asaba suggests the history provided a background for the municipal office to think greenery in the city, i.e. a variation of Western approach for Regent’s Park, Central Park, Champs-Elysees, or Unter den Linden. Large well-manicured parks are “in,” like Yamashita Park or Minato-no-Mieruoka Park, and trees lining boulevards are must-haves, such as Ohdori Park and roads in Minato-Mirai area. All of those parks and boulevards are public and maintained by the City. The downtown area of Yokohama is almost entirely reclaimed lands, and the work is still going on. (Do you know there is a plan to reconfigure the mouth of Katabira River and Aratama River next to Yokohama Station?) To see the evolution of Yokohama’s “coast,” I recommend you to go to the south underground corridor connecting JR East ticket gates and Tokyu Toyoko gates in Yokohama Station. The walls there is a mini-museum explaining the construction process of the vicinity of Yokohama Station from the 19th century to the present. When I first saw the photos there, I was frankly flabbergasted … no wonder some call the area around Yokohama Station is Japanese version of Sagrada Familia, i.e. a perpetual large construction process. I guess 150 years of modern city planning this way was good for tourism business. When you ask any (non-Yokohama-local) Japanese about Yokohama, they would say “Ah, that port city with lots of western style park and fashionable streets, isn’t it?”
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| This
is how tourists perceive greenery in Yokohama. |
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| Woooooooo, it’s very Yokohama (for visitors), isn’t it? |
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Underground mini-museum
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When Mr. Asaba became a city architect, Yokohama was in the middle of population explosion. The provision for public spaces could not keep up with the change. As of 1982, we Yokohama people had the least park acreage per capita, 2 m2, among the largest cities in Japan. In the same year, the top was occupied by the people in Kobe who had more than 7 m2 (… well, it’s still not much). So, Mr. Asaba was busy building municipal playparks for kids in the newly developed residential areas. I remember when I was in elementary school, our playfields was swamps and rice paddies that were surrounded by small forests. Due to untreated household effluent, contaminated stinky river ran nearby, and the rice paddies hosted strong (and definitely not indigenous) American crayfishes. The forests housed rhinoceros beetles and stag beetles that made our summer recess gorgeous. Soon the rice paddies became condos and supermarkets. The swamps were reclaimed to be community parks with swings and picnic benches under the newly planted cherry trees. Decades later the coverage ratio of sewer in Yokohama became 99.99%, which brought back sweetfish to rivers. Next to the former stinking river is our now decades old local parks with pretty cherry blossoms and pansies surrounded by houses and condos. … Where are the beetles?
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| Play garden near Komaoka Nakago Citizen Forest |
Meanwhile, according to Mr. Asaba, his next cubicle colleagues for agricultural policy division were probably in a crisis mode because of the loss of traditional scenery in the inland area of Yokohama. Beyond the hills surrounding the downtown for foreigners, an ancient highway, Tokaido aka Route 1, runs between Tokyo and Kyoto. Many routes are spreading from Tokaido, including the road of ironmongers in the Enkaisan area to Kamakura. There were many agricultural villages connected by the road network where the traditional Satoyama life thrived for more than millennia, but was brutally destroyed by housing developments with bursting population. (… er, well, our family moved from Tokyo when I was a kid). When in 1969 new City Planning National Act 新都市計画法 became effective, the officers in agriculture policy division of Yokohama took an initiative to establish unique criterion for zoning and managed to set aside at least 25% of the city for greenery as urbanization control area. In 1971, the City merged agriculture bureau and park division in order to establish Green Policy Bureau 緑政局 as a one-stop-shop for greenery policy, which was the first governmental experiment in Japan. In the same year, zoning and industrial policy for agriculture in the City was codified 「農業専用地区」制度・要綱 and Outlines of Special Measures to Preserve Greenery in Yokohama 緑地保存特別対策要綱 was established. They were followed by the City Ordinance for Create and Nurture Greenery 緑の環境をつくり育てる条例 in 1973. These 3 policies became the administrative foundation for Citizen Forests. In those early days, the city office which was in charge of Citizen Forests was the agriculture division, not the park division, though they were in the same Green Policy Bureau. So, from the beginning the Citizen Forest program was based on the agreement between the city and the landlords whose ancestors are farmers of Satoyama villages, and the spirit of the policy was for preserving Japanese agricultural tradition, which was very collective. Idea for involving community and partnership between the local government and civil societies were “inevitable,” Mr. Asaba wrote. The borderline case was the forests of Enkaisan around Kanazawa Zoo. In 1969, Kamariya, Mine, Hitorizawa, Segami, Kanazawa, and Nature Sanctuary Forests were designated as a special green space by the Act on the Conservation of Suburban Green Zones in the National Capital Region 首都圏近郊緑地保全法. The city of Yokohama allocated the job to take care of them to the park division, not the ag division. I had a kind of a-ha moment. That’s why Rokkokutoge Hiking Route is surrounded by houses, and very little professional agricultural land nearby. It would be due to “difference in policy priority” between the ag and the park divisions in the city office.
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| A vista from Kamariya Citizen Forest |
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| And
this is a view from Miho Forest. Between Niiharu and Miho Forests, there are professional agricultural lands. |
Mr. Asaba wrote for some time city officials were aware of such uncomfortableness in the green policy. So, the staff started a project to reorganize the Green Policy Bureau. (Oh yeah, it’s not some outside management consultants who did it.) In 1987, they completed the sorting of the Bureau’s job into ag policy, urban park issues, creation of greenery, and coordination of the above 3 within the Bureau. They decided to let the office in charge of greenery creation, greenery policy division, take care of all the Citizen Forests. At the same time, the city began to organize the system to connect forests that desperately needed maintenance jobs, and ordinary Yokohama people who wanted to be engaged in conservation of local greenery. The city officials defined their job as a coordinator between the forests and the volunteers, i.e. they decided not to monopolize forestry in the city. In 1994, the city began organizing formal support system for volunteers. The project included calls for volunteer participants, town hall meeting for local community to explain the idea of forest conservation by civic partnership, coordination between volunteers and ward offices, lectures of environmental science by college professors, lab sessions for thinning trees, how-to for democratic group formation (you know, planning for a fair organizational structure, deciding quorum system, making a rule of the group … that kind of things), and volunteer-wide networking conferences. The networking was culminated in 1998 when Yokohama hosted the 6th Congress for the Coppice of Japan. Mr. Asaba wrote he moved to Greenery Policy Division in 1996 and organized lots of those programs. He never experienced a shortage of citizen participants, and concluded people in Yokohama really wanted to have a direct and daily connection with green environment, not just pass through a tree-lined road. By then, Mr. Asaba has accumulated professional experience of partnership with civic organization in Maioka Forest. There is a story. I write it in the next post. J
The list of Yokohama Citizen Forests
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As of May 2016
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Forest
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Date Opened
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Acreage (ha)
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Iijima
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4/5/1972
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5.7
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Kamigo
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4/10/1972
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4.9
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Shimonagaya
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4/15/1972
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6.1
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Miho
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11/4/1972
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39.5
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Kamariya
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11/7/1973
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11.8
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Mine
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10/8/1974
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13
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Shishigaya
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4/26/1975
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18.6
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Seya
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4/24/1976
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19.1
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Hitorizawa
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4/12/1977
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67.1
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Kozukue Castle
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10/1/1977
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4.6
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Segami
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7/7/1979
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48.2
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Shomyoji Temple
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7/11/1979
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10.7
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Kumano Shrine
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7/19/1980
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5.3
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Bugenji Temple
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4/23/1983
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2.3
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Jike
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10/28/1983
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12.4
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Masakarigafuchi
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10/25/1984
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6.5
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Wuethrich
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5/30/1987
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3.2
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Yasashi
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4/28/1991
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5.1
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Tsunashima
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10/26/1991
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6.1
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Oiwake
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3/26/1994
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32.9
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Minamihonjuku
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9/17/1995
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6.3
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Araizawa
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5/24/1998
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9.6
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Niiharu
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3/26/2000
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67.2
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Maioka
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5/5/2001
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19.5
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Sekigaya
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10/26/2003
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2.2
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Kamoihara
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4/2/2005
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2
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Komaoka-Nakago
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4/28/2007
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1.1
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Kanazawa
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5/17/2011
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24.8
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Fukaya
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4/1/2012
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3.1
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Nakata-Miyanodai
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7/20/2012
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1.3
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Imajuku
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3/15/2013
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3
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Kajigeya
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4/1/2014
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2.9
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Kawawa
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4/1/2014
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4
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Shinbashi
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1/16/2015
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3.3
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Kashiwacho
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9/1/2015
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1.9
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4/1/2016
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11.5
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Nagatsuda
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In
development
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3
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In
development
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4.7
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In
development
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4
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In
development
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15.2
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In
development
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2.1
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Tomiokahigashi-3chome
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In
development
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1.5
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Kamikawai
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In
development
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10.1
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Total
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527.4
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| The rose
garden of Minato-no-Mieruoka Park in the downtown of Yokohama. It is a typical municipal garden for “visitors” in Yokohama. They are capable of receiving thousands of people yearly. |
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| A road
in Araizawa Forest … it might be better not advertising this place too much … its atmosphere is magical, but the ecology does not have the capacity of the rose garden above … |
The City Office who’s in charge of
execution of Green-up Plan is
Yokohama Municipal Government
Creative Environment Policy Bureau 横浜市環境創造局
Phone: 045-671-2891
FAX: 045-641-3490
http://www.city.yokohama.lg.jp/kankyo/
