Naomi and I have just returned from a wonderful trip to Tokyo. This is the first time for us to fly out of Haneda airport in Tokyo bay—we have always used Narita, which is far outside the city.

In most respects, Tokyo is probably as far as you can get from a natural landscape—a large part of the land in this image was “reclaimed” from the bay itself. The rivers that at one point meandered across the alluvial plane the city was built on are fixed in their path. The twenty-three wards of the metropolitan area have an average population density of 13,913 people per km². When combined with the neighboring prefectures of Chiba (foreground), Kanagawa (just in the top left corner), and Saitama, the conurbation totals thirty-three million people, about the same population as Canada, the second largest country by land area. Click on the image for a larger view.