Gardening in Japan
My favourite hobby – well, it’s not really a hobby, just an excuse to get some fresh air – is doing the garden, although it mostly consists of cutting the grass, watering the plants, and following directions on where to place everything! This survey from MyVoice looked at how the Japanese approached gardening.
Demographics
Over the first five days of August 2008 14,858 members of the MyVoice internet community successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample were female, 1% in their teens, 16% in their twenties, 37% in their thirties, 28% in their forties, and 18% in their fifties.
I wonder if the keenness to grow vegetables is in any way connected with the recent rises in prices of many goods? From our garden we get mint and chives, mainly. We got a Brussels sprout plant but it’s still to sprout. Two years ago we planted oba/shiso and got a huge crop; with 10 leaves costing 80 to 100 yen per pack, and us going through up to 50 per week, 200 yen for a seedling from the garden centre is a wonderful bargain. We’ve got a lot of roses, but although they are lovely in the spring, they really suffer in the summer and we’re just beginning to get some new flowers through, but they’re barely a quarter of the size! Oh, and three weeks ago I had great fun relieving stress by hacking a path through two overgrown bushes.
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The average Japanese home often has little of a garden, as with land both scarce and expensive there is little incentive to waste it on such frivolaties as grass; indeed I saw a television advertisement recently for a building company whose USP (Unique Selling Point) was that they could squeeze your new home in with as little as 15 centimetres of clearance from the next house! So, with that in mind let’s look at a survey counducted by DIMSDRIVE Research on a subject that’s close to my heart, that of 
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