Japanese cucumber grower Makoto Koike was recently featured in an article by Amos Zeeberg on TheNewYorker.com. In 2014, at the age of thirty-three, Koike left his job and city life to move to his parents’ cucumber farm, in the greener prefecture of Shizuoka. “I thought I was getting old,” Koike told Zeeberg. “I wanted to be close to my home and my family.”
The Koikes have been growing cucumbers in Kosai, a town wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the brackish Lake Hamana, for nearly fifty years. Their crop, which fills three small greenhouses, grows year-round.