Exhibition Greenhouse (展示温室), Medicinal Plant Garden, Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences

The greenhouse belongs to a garden conceived first as a teaching tool. The chronology in the official brochure records that the university was founded in 1880 as Japan's first private institution of pharmaceutical education. In 1931 a medicinal herb garden with a greenhouse was opened next to the school building at Kashiwagi, now in Shinjuku ward; in 1938 another herb garden was opened in what is now the city of Koganei. When the university moved to Hachioji in 1976, the garden was relocated within the campus, into a valley open to the east and ringed by hills. The valley floor was levelled to receive the sample garden, the cultivation fields and the management building.

The same brochure dates the completion of the greenhouse and the management building to 1984, and that of the nature observation path to 1993.

Created for teaching and research, the garden now counts opening to the public among its important tasks. Since 1994 a public lecture followed by a garden visit has been held twice a year. A section of medicinal trees, the arboretum, opened in 2023, and since 1 April 2024 visitors have entered only through the south gate. The garden appears on the July 2025 membership list of the Japanese Association of Botanical Gardens.

This description rests on the photographs and the illustrated map in the official brochure, and on the OpenStreetMap outline. The photos show a fully glazed greenhouse, with a fine, light-coloured frame dividing large panes on the walls and the roofs alike.

Seen from above, the greenhouse combines a polygonal main body, whose roof rises to a point like an irregular pyramid, with a lower rectangular wing covered in glass slopes. The walls stand on a concrete base, and a concrete building with a flat roof terrace runs alongside the greenhouse; the brochure dates the greenhouse and the management building to the same year, 1984, without saying whether this is that building. Nearby, the photo shows smaller, more modest production greenhouses of translucent appearance.

Inside, one brochure view shows a boardwalk edged with stones winding among tropical plants and palm fronds beneath the glass roof.

The brochure presents the greenhouse as the garden's area for tropical and subtropical medicinal plants; many subtropical fruit trees and plants used as spices can also be seen. Among the species the brochure places in the greenhouse is the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao), an evergreen of tropical America whose flowers appear on the trunk and whose seeds, fermented and processed, yield chocolate and cocoa. The ginger garden, devoted mainly to the ginger family, is open only in the warm season: its young plants spend the winter in a greenhouse.

Every plant carries a label: Latin, Japanese, English and Chinese names, family, part used and drug name, effects, constituents, use in kampo formulas, and the chemical structure of an important constituent, with pictograms for toxic plants and for those listed in the Japanese Pharmacopoeia. For the garden as a whole, the current brochure speaks of about 2,000 plants maintained; an older brochure counted about 500 wild and 1,500 cultivated species, and a 2026 list of gardens hosting kampo training sessions gives about 2,500 species.

The greenhouse occupies the valley floor, near the sample garden; the observation path, through the woods on the hillside, extends the visit. The garden is above all a place of study: free, unguided visits, a register to sign, no picking, and meals only on the bench in front of the entrance. Visitors enter only through the south gate, at the bus terminus, and the campus has no car park.

The yamayuri lily, the flower of the city of Hachioji, blooms from mid-July to early August. Twice a year, in June and in September or October, a public lecture is followed by a garden visit, by registration. Hirayama-jōshi Park, a metropolitan park known for its cherry trees, is a neighbour; the Insectopia of Tama Zoo, already in the catalogue, lies about 2.3 km away.