Declan Murphy wrote:

> If you like rural countryside

As opposed to the urban kind? ;-)

>> There was a more closely-knit "core" community of people who
>> had their roots in the area, and I was on good terms with some
>> of the local shopkeepers and some of the frequenters of local
>> watering holes, but they were rather swamped, both by the
>> proximity of the base and by the fact that they had gone, in a
>> couple of generations, from being a little village to being a
>> suburb of Tokyo.
>
> That seems to be happening everywhere near major cities.

Well, but where we now live (on the edge of Saitama) is approximately the
same distance from central Tokyo, and it's decidedly urban sprawl (with
allotments, woods, parks and such scattered around), but it retains a sense
of community.

On reflection, I think these things are very very localised. One of my
students lives on a main Tokyo artery road in what shows on the map as the
same city as I'm in, and she says there's very little sense of community
there. And when it snows, on my street the neighbours are out in force with
shovels, while in the next street a hundred yards away the snow is just left
to lie.

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com