May 12, 2000

Oi Wild Bird Park, Tokyo and Yokohama Nature Center

“A few steps into the park I ran into a Bull-headed Shrike who was calling the entire park's attention to himself."

"So this," I thought, "is how diamonds are made." Then I reflected a moment. "Only I bet the pressure that goes into creating them is a whole lot less." These thoughts, or psychotic fragments of them, passed through my head on the Yamanote Line at 8:00, headed towards Hamamatsu-cho Station in Tokyo. For people who have commuted on this route, no further explanation is required.

For those who haven’t, imagine for a moment a balding head. Then imagine the head covered in a light film of sweat. Then imagine said head doused in hair tonic souped up to smell like a cross between transmission fluid and cheap whiskey. Finally, imagine that head wedged right up under your nose, literally touching your chin so that you can feel the sweaty unguent against your own skin. Now you’ve captured one tiny speck of the Tokyo a.m. commuter experience.

To flesh it out, as it were, compound this nauseating intimacy by multiplying every part of your body with someone else’s. "Oh, that’s his thigh, just above the knee. Gee, that feels like a buttock with a few extra pounds of beef on it. Ah, a groin. Hey, an elbow, she’s pretty bony. There, a wrist…" The inventory goes on whether you want it to or not until the train stops. Don’t bother trying to move before the doors open, or trying to position yourself so that you can get out at your station or avoid touching or being touched. Until the pneumatic wheeze draws open the doors to your cage, you can–and people who’ve done it know–lift both feet off the ground and not slip downwards so much as an inch.

But once the train stops at the platform you can forget staying on the train if you’re anywhere near the door, and it doesn’t matter if it’s your stop. The outgoing flow literally jerks you out and dumps you on the platform. If you’re lucky you’ll have a second or two to catch your breath before you have to dive back in and fight tooth and toenail for one of the prime positions down the aisle and away from the doors. But only the fit, the few, the feisty and the experienced can get these places. Rank beginners will never advance beyond the foyer, and will suffer the blowing outs and rushing ins at each and every stop.

Two stations before Hamamatsu-cho a particularly vicious outflow tore off a shoe, and it was a miracle that I got the end of my foot back into it. A lost shoe in the commuter crunch would be like storming the beaches in Normandy without a helmet or a rifle–the shoe not only protects your foot from getting tromped, but it’s a weapon that you can use to tread out an inch or two security zone wherever you stand.

Deposited at the right station, I took a breath, a deep one. And it wasn’t only me. My fellow commuters on the platform were breathing deeply, too. I was a wreck. But it drives Japanese commuters crazy as well. A friend and I had this conversation: "I went to Tokyo yesterday and got crushed in the trains. Horrible experience."

"Yes," he said. "I can’t stand the morning commute. It’s unbearable. Simply intolerable."

"One day was enough to last me a lifetime. If I had to do that on a regular basis I’d lose my mind."

"Me, too. It’s beyond intolerable. I used to commute and I hated it. Finally just threw in the towel, the morning stress was so tremendous it affected my work."

"Gosh. How long did you gut it out?"

"Fifteen years."

I changed to a less crowded train. Birding the urban wilderness next led me to Oi Wild Bird Park, a piece of habitat built on a slab of "reclaimed" Tokyo Bay near Haneda Airport. The park owes its existence not to any innate appreciation of nature or desire to soften the concrete canals and jarring racket of this purely industrial wharf area, but rather to an economic catastrophe. Full-bore bay usurpation–excuse me, reclamation–came to a howling halt during the first oil shock of the early 70’s. Construction projects were dropped in-progress like the hot handle of an iron kettle. Weeds took over, standing water swelled into small ponds, and bird-friendly vegetation replaced the weeds. Natural selection puts a premium on opportunism, and birds, the master niche-finders, quickly moved into the abandoned site.

Birdwatchers followed, and pressed to have the area turned into a site while the economic luster of the bay "development" project was in its rust phase. The Tokyo metropolitan government threw the birders a bone, or rather the shards of a gnawed one: Oi Wild Bird Park began as a tiny 1.2-acre facility in 1978. Time and popularity have increased its size to almost 9 acres. I got there about 9:00 a.m. on a Friday morning and had the place mostly to myself.

The park wasn’t particularly birdy, since the main season is winter, when it acts as a wintering ground for ducks and grebes. Spring and fall migrations catch a fair amount of visitation from plovers, stilts and sandpipers, but none were in evidence on this day. The park has a freshwater pond replenished by rainfall; this water then travels via pump to a brackish pond below it. Deciduous thickets, open fields and rice paddy habitats were built to partially recreate the original habitat of the lower Tamagawa River. Given the unbelievable racket in this part of Tokyo Bay, what’s astounding is how totally the park ensconces you in wood and water. Except for the east side of the park, where the trucks and traffic penetrate into the seclusion of the trail, once you enter this space you’ve left the ugly mess of "reclaimed" Tokyo Bay behind.

A few steps into the park I ran into a Bull-headed Shrike who was calling the entire park’s attention to himself. Perched on a limb he cried out, interrupting his monologue only long enough to snatch at insects and gobble them down with incredible voracity. The more he ate, the hungrier he looked and the more shrilly he cried. Neighboring his tree was a large bush. Inside it I could see a female Narcissus Flycatcher, as olive drab and unremarkable as her absent mate was brilliant. She seemed anxious as she flitted from branch to branch, paying inordinate attention to the bragging, voracious shrike outside the bush.

I stepped away from the bush to glance down a small path–suddenly the flycatcher began to shriek. Inside the bush the shrike now stood an inch away from her and she raged at him, getting as close as she dared, which, considering the shrike’s predatory nature, was pretty close. He had something in his mouth, and this time it wasn’t a bug but rather something soft and fluffy. I assumed that he’d decided to flesh out his insect appetizers with some real meat, but couldn’t see clearly enough to tell if it was one of the flycatcher’s brood. Then the chase began. Intimidated, the shrike abandoned his prey and left the bush. The flycatcher followed the shrike, and I followed the flycatcher. Around the park we waltzed, the shrike trying to get away and the flycatcher approaching him wherever he alit and bawling him out in a voice I didn’t know that meek and melodic flycatchers had.

Oi Wild Bird Park seems like a tiny corner of paradise tucked away in a big mess of a city. Unsurprisingly, even this postage stamp-sized refuge faces serious problems. Mr. Takahashi, one of the park administrators, explained that the park gets 45,000 visitors per year, or roughly 120 people per day. Problem is, most of these people come in big clumps on the weekend, and far exceed the refuge’s carrying capacity of about 300 people. Worse, the urban war zone surrounding Oi Wild Bird Park means that people desperate for a little green flock to the site–and these people are not birdwatchers. Less than 4,000 birders visit the park annually, and administrators would be ecstatic to have more birders and fewer of the general public, which pays the four-dollar entry fee and then picnics in the park. This obviously distracts the birders, but it’s a major disturbance for the birds that the park ostensibly exists to protect.

One simple solution to the problem would be to expand the park, limit the number of people who can use the park at a given time, and give priority to birdwatchers. Just across the road is a multiuse public park that exists expressly for families and picnickers. Of course when given the choice between snacking at a multiuse park and a quiet, natural habitat filled with the callings of wild birds, people vote with their feet, and their feet vote for Oi.

Expansion is partially blocked by the neighboring vegetable wholesale market. Its owners fear that increased park traffic will interfere with the market’s ingress and egress. The big ditch that can’t be leaped, however, is money. The park’s sole revenue comes from entry fees, which bring in less than $200,000 per year. Operating costs? Close to a million. Who fills the whole? The city.

"Does the park have any PR mechanisms in place to increase awareness among birders about the park?" "No."

"Does the park have any plans to seek alternate sources of revenue?" "No."

"Does the park have any ideas about how it might begin dealing with the twin crises of budget crunch and overuse?" "No."

"What’s going to happen to this park as a bird refuge?"

"We don’t know."

Nothing is more powerful than inertia, except perhaps the feeling of helplessness that goes along with it. Fermata saw in this facility a tremendously aggressive statement about the value of nature in the big city, and about how such a little space can generate such a huge impact. And the irony is that birds and people react to nature in exactly the same way! A little green, a little shelter from the rumbling trucks, a sliver of natural habitat, and city dwellers, right along with the birds, will respond en masse.

Unlike traditional approaches to park and sanctuary conservation, Fermata diametrically opposes the idea that you best deal with overuse by curtailing park availability. We believe that heavy usage of any natural facility is, far from being a liability, a tremendous political club that skillful park administrators, conservationists and local officials can wield to get MORE parkland, to get BETTER facilities, and to develop PROFITABLE revenue bases from which to better preserve existing facilities.

As a case in point, look at what happens whenever park officials try to lobby internally for greater funds. They invariably have to answer the question about park usage. If no one’s using the park, that’s the end of the discussion. If overuse is the problem then negotiations have just begun, and the presumption is in favor of the park, although that presumption is usually wasted when the park takes the approach of how to limit usage. Rather than coming up with strategies to admit fewer people, why not use heavy visitation for what it plainly is? And what it is, is proof that more parkland and less concrete are needed in the immediate vicinity. Moreover, these are political forces that, effectively channeled, can bring direct pressure onto the politicians who get on the stump and who negotiate behind closed doors–the people who can fill in bays, or replace concrete with trees if they so choose.

Of course there are certain habitats that, due to their planetary uniqueness, will always be subject to some types of usage restrictions. There is, for example, a limited number of people who can gather on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. And for Oi Bird Park, some initial levels of preferential park usage are plainly called for. When a park cannot immediately counter overuse by expanding facilities, some form of discriminatory usage is necessary, whether in the form of reservations, preference for certain types of use, or simple seasonal restrictions. But to take the approach that too many people want to experience nature and therefore demand needs to be reduced, stifled, or actively campaigned against–or worst of all, ignored–plays directly into the hands of people who prefer housing tracts and rebars to nesting habitats. Long term use-restriction policies, or the reliance on preferential admission as a permanent way to deal with overcrowding squanders the single most powerful force for change that exists: behavioral trends of the public. If more people want to experience nature and there aren’t enough places to do it, then governments, states and local communities should create more.

Oi Wild Bird Park provides a critical link between urban residents and wildlife, and an aggressive, methodical, business-oriented approach to its difficulties could greatly ease what promise to be tough times ahead.

A sampling of birds you can see at Oi:

Siberian Meadow Bunting, Azure-winged Magpie, Rufous Turtle Dove, Long-eared Owl, Common Kingfisher, Daurian Redstart, Bull-headed Shrike, Kestrel, Short-eared Owl, Marsh Harrier, Brown-eared Bulbul, Japanese White-eye, Great Tit, Reed Bunting, Barn Swallow, Coot, Great Cormorant, Common Teal, Gadwall, White Wagtail, Little Grebe, Eurasian Wigeon, Northern Shoveler, Pintail, Tufted Duck, Pochard, Black-headed Gull, Red-necked Stint, Asian Wandering Tattler, Black-winged Stilt, Greenshand, Little Tern, Common Sandpiper, Black-tailed Godwit, Wood Sandpiper, Ruddy Turnstone, Dunlin, Little Ringed Plover, Black-tailed Gull, Black-crowned Night Heron, Little Egret, Common Snipe, Mongolian Plover, Grey Heron, Chinese Little Bittern

How to get there:

By car

This is a place you’re better off going to by train. The bird park has minimal parking, and the train ride is simple. Car traffic in this area is always congested, and getting into and out of it requires you to navigate some of the worst traffic in Japan. But if you must…Take Highway 357 to the Tokai Exit, go straight until the first major street; turn left. Go a couple hundred meters to the next big intersection and turn left again. Go straight for about a kilometer and you will see signs for the park, which is on your left.

Map to Oi Wild Bird Park

By train

Take the JR Yamanote Line to Hamamatsu-cho Station. Transfer to the Monorail that goes to Haneda Airport, and get off at the Ryutsu Senta Station. Exit the station, turn right, and walk straight for about fifteen minutes. The park has a large brown sign in Japanese, but it’s impossible to mistake even if you can’t read the characters. Don’t be misled by the little plaques of birds along the route, they will veer you off to the right and into the multiuse park. Just go straight. The monorail station itself has no signage to the park and the way is unmarked. I asked a station employee, who was extremely solicitous.

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