Perhaps because it is more relentlessly urban than most modern industrial countries -- thanks to its inhospitable geography -- Japan is also more devoted than most to the ideal of an unspoiled rural life. The faster the foreground fills up with ugly concrete structures and electricity cables, the more doggedly the country's city-dwellers focus on the splendid peaks and forests in the background.

Everyone has seen Mount Fuji from the shinkansen or the expressway, obscured by smog and bisected by power lines, yet the nation's mental image of the sacred mountain remains the one in the coffee-table photo books: a vision floating free and grand and untrammeled above the trivial urban blight. In the same way, Japanese still tend to think of themselves as a rugged, simple people, unusually attuned to natural beauty and seasonal rhythms and somehow undefined by their own unsightly cities and artificial urban lifestyles. It is not really a contradiction. The intensity of the one experience -- high-speed, neon-lit, money-driven urban life -- logically generates a celebration of its opposite.

One measure of how deep the strain of rural nostalgia runs here can be found in the books people read, especially the books they give their children to read. Significantly, some of the most popular children's books in postwar Japan have been translations of foreign classics that strike exactly this pastoral-inspirational note: "The Secret Garden" from England, "Anne of Green Gables" from Canada, and, towering above them all, "Heidi," by the Swiss writer Joanna Spyri, who died 100 years ago this July.