No, these are not photographs of rooftop farms in Japan
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on October 25, 2018 at 16:00
- 2 min read
- By AFP Indonesia
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A health-related Facebook page with nearly a million followers called Tips Dokter Cantik -- Tips From a Beautiful Doctor -- posted seven images on October 2, 2018, with a caption saying: "Farms on rooftops of houses in Japan."
The post has 2,801 shares, 4,100 reactions and numerous comments praising Japan as a developed country that has managed to find creative solutions to limited agricultural land.
"Japanese people are brilliant," one comment says.
Those images are actually all of rooftop rice paddies in China, according to reverse image searches using Google and TinEye.
The Facebook post's main image, showing a worker wearing blue shirt in a rooftop rice paddy, featured in a 2014 China Daily article with the title: "Roof garden in Liuzhou."
The photo caption says: “A woman works on a roof garden at a local brewery company in Liuzhou, South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, May 12, 2014. Rice, vegetables and lotus are planted on the 0.2-hectare roof garden, which combines ecological agriculture with industrial production.”
The Gulinglong wine company in Liuzhou, Guangxi province in China told AFP that the photos were authentic and showed their rooftop garden in Liuzhou.
Chen Huizhen, a former salesman for the Gulinglong wine company, confirmed that the images were of rice paddies on the company’s rooftop.
“The reason for the rooftop farm is to make full use of land and make the house cooler in summer,” Chen said, adding that the company was still growing rice on the roof.
Most of the other photographs in the misleading Indonesian Facebook post show different views of the wine company's two rice-covered building roofs.
One aerial photograph of the rooftop paddies, credited to the Xinhua news agency, appeared in a China Daily 2013 article.
Two further images of the rooftop rice paddies which were used in the misleading Facebook post appear in this May 2018 article by popular blog Shanghaiist.
Another of the photographs used in the misleading Facebook post, again featuring the Gulinglong wine company's rooftop paddies, appeared in a 2013 Reuters article.
The final picture used in the misleading Facebook post appeared in a 2013 Daily Mail article about a man who transforms his rooftop in China's Zhejiang province into a farm.
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