These unattended stands, called Mujin Hanbai, can be seen in some places around Tokorozawa.
These stands are owned by local farmers or gardeners. They place their produce, along with a donation box, here. The vegetables would be sold for about 100yen per bag. It's a lot cheaper compared to the supermarket.
I sometimes buy my edamame at one of the stands on weekends. I like how they trust you to leave 100yen in the box.
7 comments:
Is 100 yen cheap to buy vegetables?
i love this photo. make me wanna go there ;)
I would occasionally come across these on some of my favorite walks in Tokyo—along the former Tamagawa Josui canal.
White Oleander, I guess it depends of the produce, but most of them would be priced cheaper than the local supermarket. Especially for locally produced veggies. We're so much more conscientious about where the produce is made these days.
cellini.k, thanks for the comment! If you're ever in Japan you'll see a bunch of these places :)
Gary, I've never been down there...what kind of produce did they sell?
Kaori, it’s not like there were a lot of private stands there, and the ones I saw and used kind of came and went but they would usually be next to private garden patches or fields next to the walkway along the canal. The vegetables sold this way were the same as in any Japanese garden. I would have bought Japanese eggplant and green peppers because I used them, along with chicken, in both spaghetti and Thai curry; and with cashews in the case of the curry. When I had little money left in the month I may have gotten a cabbage.
If you want to experience a bit of Tamagawa Josui it passes not so far from you near Taka no Dai Station. There is a Japanese site about the canal here. If you check out the photos at #8 (on the left) you can see a thumbnail of a street scene on the right. For thirteen years I worked in a building toward the end of the street and in all that time I had no idea that I was working along the former path of the canal. I learned about that only after that company went out of business. In the Edo Period it would have looked a lot like this at the top. (Actually, the woodblock is of a former scene a few hundred meters further “downstream” Koshu Kaido to near Shinjuku Gyoen. Koshu Kaido is on the other side of the buildings on the left in that street-scene photo).
That's why I love being here. You can simply trust anybody. Saijo is rather a small town surrounded by vegetable gardens, but I never come across this kind of stands. Well, my neighbour would love to give me some of their product, but that's not want I want.
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