How to Contact WWOOF Hosts

Signing up with WWOOFJapan.com is an exersise in blind faith. They have no person behind the website as I can tell, no blog and no attempt to comfort someone parting with $60 (which I think is a bit steep, but that’s another post). Reading that others have gone through the sign-up process and stayed on farms, I felt if it worked for them, it should work for me.

After going through the sign-up process I filled out a profile with skills I think hosts might like and pictures to show I’d done some agricultural work before and started looking through the listings for farms that I thought would be a good match.

After contacting a few hosts and being turned down by all of them, I knew something must be wrong on my end. A friend was also doing WWOOF in Japan and had already been accepted by the first host he contacted, Zine emailed him and asked to see the email he’d sent to the host. It made sense to me that the emails should be short and only include our interest in coming WWOOF numbers and dates, but our friend had sent a long email recounting everything already in his profile.

In the beginning we were worried we wouldn't have enough places to stay to fill the whole 10 weeks. After seeing what our friend had done we sent longer emails and started getting accepted. I’m not sure if the Japanese farmers don’t know how to check the profile or if they just consider it bad form to not introduce yourself via email.

In any event, we've got some farms to start and have other requests pending.