The 10 Year Project for Green Tokyo does not open by explaining why cities need trees. It opens with a number: Tokyo’s roadside trees, at the time of the announcement, stood at roughly four hundred eighty thousand, and the policy meant to roughly double that to one million. Announced by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Bureau of Environment on 8 June 2007, the plan builds on an earlier 10-Year Plan the government had adopted at the end of 2006 under the name “Tokyo’s Big Change,” and turns one strand of that broader plan, greenery, into its own dedicated policy with its own numeric targets.
Four pillars, not one big idea
The policy is structured around four core commitments rather than a single grand gesture. The first calls for a greening movement led jointly by citizens and private businesses, treating the government’s role as a convener rather than the sole actor. The second is the roadside tree expansion already mentioned, doubling the count to one million, in part by removing utility poles that had been competing with trees for space along streets. The third asks each community to establish what the policy calls a “hub for greening,” achieved mainly by converting school grounds from bare ground into turf, supported by trained volunteer “grass-care leaders” who maintain the new lawns once they are laid. The fourth is broader and more improvisational: using rooftops, building walls, railway land and parking lots wherever conventional park space is not available.
| Pillar | Focus | Concrete step named |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Citizen and business-led campaign | Government as convener, not sole actor |
| 2 | Roadside tree network | Utility-pole removal to make room for trees |
| 3 | School grounds as green hubs | Volunteer “grass-care leaders” maintain new turf |
| 4 | Innovative greening | Rooftops, walls, rail land, parking lots |
Reading the four pillars side by side, a pattern shows up that the policy itself never states outright: three of the four depend on volunteer labor rather than paid contractors. Citizens plant trees, citizens maintain turf, citizens and businesses jointly claim rooftop and wall space. Only the roadside-tree pillar reads as a conventional, government-executed infrastructure project. If you are trying to judge how realistic the plan’s numbers were, that reliance on volunteer capacity is the detail worth weighing most heavily, since it is exactly the kind of commitment that is hardest to sustain once the initial publicity around a launch fades.
A forest built on a landfill
The single most distinctive project inside the plan is Umi no Mori, Sea Forest. The site was reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay that had previously been used for waste disposal, and the plan set out to convert it into a forested area roughly the size of the grounds of the Imperial Palace, developed in cooperation with citizen and business volunteers rather than delivered by a contractor working alone. It is the kind of detail that does not carry the policy’s main numeric argument, but it is the part of the plan most likely to be remembered.
The targets, and their deadlines
The plan’s headline figures were specific and time-bound in a way policy documents often are not. It targeted one thousand hectares of new green area overall. It set an interim milestone of more than one hundred fifty hectares of new metropolitan and municipal parks, functioning as green hubs, opening by the end of fiscal year 2010. That figure was meant to more than double, to over three hundred hectares, by the end of fiscal year 2015.
Both deadlines are now well in the past. If you are reading this policy today expecting a status update on whether Tokyo hit those numbers, this particular document cannot give you one: it was written in 2007, before either fiscal year arrived, and it reads as a plan, not a scorecard.
Where the paper trail runs out
No live copy of the original policy document could be located on a Tokyo Metropolitan Government domain; the agency’s website has been substantially restructured since 2007, and the kind of legacy document path this policy would have lived at now simply redirects to the homepage. What survives instead are two secondary accounts written close to the time: a contemporaneous news article from Japan for Sustainability, a Japanese nonprofit specializing in English-language sustainability reporting, and a case-study summary from the Centre for Science and Environment in India, which cites the 2007 policy as background material for its own comparative research on urban green-infrastructure planning, useful evidence that the plan traveled internationally as a model, even after the primary document itself stopped being reachable.
Tokyo’s environmental policy has moved on substantially since 2007, into broader climate strategy work that supersedes this document’s narrower green-space focus. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s policy-planning bureau has continued publishing under a “Greenery Initiatives” banner, with a Version 3 English edition dated January 2025, more than seventeen years after the original 10-Year Project was announced. That later document is the appropriate place to look for a current status update, not this one.
Whether the specific 2007 targets, the million trees, the three hundred hectares of new parks, were ultimately met is a separate, factual question this particular policy paper does not and cannot answer. It was written to set a direction, not to report back on one, and reading it that way is the only honest way to use it today.