The hand-painted sign read Abenteuerspielplatz and seemed like just another interestingly incongruous vignette to stop and take a picture of along a photo-walk I was taking from Ikebukuro station to Shinjuku station in Tokyo last winter. Along the three miles I had walked, I passed an once-ostentatious neon hotel sign now engulfed in bamboo and persimmon trees, a dilapidated house with clothes and a futon sunning on the verandah abutted with a brand new parking lot, sports drinks left as offerings for a Buddhist deity… but soon after I took the photo, I realized that the sign had a real purpose. It marked the entrance to Toyama Play Park, an adventure playground.

Toyama Play Park is located in the southern part of Toyama Park, which is next to one of Japan’s top universities, Waseda. The northern part of the park is spacious and airy and when I passed through there were many students from the university going to and fro by foot and bike and sitting under trees. A few teenagers were playing baseball under a giant willow. The middle section of the park was denser with trees, which made it seem ideal for the homeless community who had set up camp there to feel a little sense of privacy. For all of the tranquility of the park, I couldn’t help but note its interesting and potentially radical population: college students, the homeless and children. Combine this with the park’s location only a few minutes north of one of Tokyo’s largest red-light districts, Kabukicho, and one might guess that Toyama Play Park would feel gritty and urban. But the park is bustling with rustic activity. Children of ages from about five to fifteen were climbing trees, cooking mochi over a grill fueled by wood charcoal and leaves that are collected from nearby, spinning traditional Japanese tops (this requires winding the top with a string and uncoiling it in deft motion that I’ve never seen anyone succeed at first try), hammering planks together, walking on bamboo stilts…

Having only read about and seen pictures of adventure playgrounds, I was happy to have stumbled onto this one and eager to find out more about Toyama Play Park and adventure playgrounds in Japan. I struck up a conversation with Izumi, a co-founder and mother of two children who were running around the park as we spoke. She explained to me that as a parent, she is very concerned for the culture in which her children are growing, in which parents feel that it is unsafe to let their children play outside, and children’s free-time is micromanaged to include as many extracurricular activities as possible and video games are the dominant mode of play. She went on to say that it is important for children to have a safe (supervised) space where they can find other children to play with and allows space for children to grow into their true selves. Her frank and humble demeanor did not give me the impression of someone advocating for something that in the USA might be seen as fringy. She surprised me by saying that there were actually about 250 adventure playgrounds in Japan (the only figure I could find was on the Japan Adventure Playground Association that listed there being 230 as of 2008). It struck me as strange that in the USA, where teenagers are allowed to drive at 16 (in Japan the legal driving age is 20, which is the age in which Japanese are officially recognized by society as adults) and the idea of freedom is much more glorified than in Japan there were only a few adventure playgrounds.

Izumi had to take her children home but before going she introduced me to Kanako, an adult supervisor, or play leader, as they are called. I guessed that Kanako was in her mid to late 20′s judging from the job experiences she’d had since graduation from college. Her last job was in an office which she said was unsatisfying because of the its mundane bureaucratic nature and long hours, and she had been working as a play leader full time now for about a year. Rain or shine she is there Tuesday through Saturday from ten AM to five PM. Most of the play parks in Japan are housed within public parks and so receive funding from the city, which is how Kanako and her coworkers are paid. Kanako tells me that the other play leaders have diverse backgrounds and are all really good people who are idealistic about social change. The most difficult thing about the job for her is knowing how much or little to intervene in the play and disputes of the children. One important aspect of the philosophy of the park is to allow children to learn from their failures, but weighing the pros of a learning experience with the cons of frustration or pain is not easy to do all day long with so many children, she says. Occasionally, children who should be in school will come to the park. Some of these children are victims of bullying and can’t stomach going to school and would rather risk getting in trouble for playing hooky. Some of these children are from the nearby Shimbashi area, which is home to many Koreans and other immigrants. The bullying these children experience might be racial discrimination or it might be that the child’s Japanese is not good enough for her to comprehend the classes at school and so she decides she would rather stay home, or go to the park. Kanako is careful to draw a line between her role as play leader and that of a social worker. The play leaders are encouraged to take seminars in social work but feel that it is only in their capacity to give encouragement and practical advice. She said that working with these children has made her want to go back to school to become a social worker.

It happened to be the last day of one the other play leaders so Kanako excused herself to go and join a group photo. As we were talking, the activity in the park had wound down but I was still able to take a few photos before walking the rest of the way to Shinjuku station.

Article and photography by: Yutaka Houlette

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