It was nice to get away from Trumplandia for a while. I've been back less than two weeks and my mind has already become cluttered with him again. No way to escape the Orange Menace on television and social media. I spent three weeks with my family in Japan. Our oldest daughter flew up from Sydney to meet us in Tokyo and from there we toured the country, taking in the bottom half of Hokkaido, the Kyoto area and back to Tokyo. Of course you can only catch a glimpse of a country like Japan in that short a time, like glimpsing Mt. Fuji first on the right side and then on the left as the Shinkansen bullet train sped past Hakone on our return from Kyoto. I had always thought Mt. Fuji was to the east of Tokyo. If nothing else I got a better sense of geography. So what stuck out to me on this trip? The first was that Tokyo didn't seem like a big city at all despite having nearly 15 million inhabitants. At street level the city seems like any other city, densely packed to be sure, but ...