Photos

This is typical of the view one sees from the shinkansen (or bullet train) between Tokyo and Osaka -- rice (or other) fields, houses, mountains, haze and the occasional billboard. The Tokaido train line runs along the Kanto Plain where most of Japan's population is located.

From what I've seen, growing rice in Japan is still very labor intensive and usually performed on a fairly small scale. (I'm not sure but my guess is that fields depicted here are not all owned by the same growers). As one might suspect, rice is a very important crop in Japan and the rice growing lobby is very powerful.

Although this area is considered "rural" by Japanese standards, you can see that even in areas like this the houses are side-by-side and the population density is still quite high.

The train was going quite fast so each view such as this one was gone in seconds.

The billboard says "Ginza Stephanie" which appears to be a cosmetics chain judging from a web search I just performed.