Palo Alto, a small town in the largely rural Santa Clara County, etc.

I used to live in Narashino a little over a decade ago. By no means rural, but definitely a small town compared to one of the Tokyo wards. Also, I wouldn't call it dense at all -- granted, I haven't look at the people/sqm metrics.

It might be a dense suburb now but what was it like 40 years ago when he moved there?

In 1980? Not much different to today. The population then was 125k, today it is about 175k.

Yeah even back then the population density is way higher than anywhere I've ever lived.

However I still take issue with the original argument of:

> just in case anyone was falling for the romantic falsehood this line was selling.

I don't think it's misrepresented anything. The original comment in the article is:

>Narashino, a small town in the largely rural Chiba Prefecture

Whatever it's population density is, 175k people is still a small town.

Everything is relative. To me, and a lot of people I know who grew up in small towns, 175,000 people certainly isn't "small".