They really have stopped making it.

I've commented before how I find myself slipping into - if not actually 'being Japanese' - then at least finding living here more and more like wearing a comfortable pair of slippers. There have been a series of 'landmarks' over the last few years that have brought this home to me. The first was when I was given a three year residence visa rather than having to scramble to re-new it every twelve months and another was exchanging my UK Driving Licence for a Japanese one.

And another of these little milestones today. I had a letter from the local City Office confirming that I'd been appointed to serve as a 'citizen advisor' on a committee to help with drafting a new "City Master Plan" over the next two years.

It happened like this. A couple of months ago there was a local essay competition run to look for ideas on the contents of a new plan for our new city area - an amalgam of four earlier rural districts. I just couldn't resist because there are so many issues that I feel strongly about around here, but especially the destruction of the local 'yato' - the ancient rice field areas in the narrow valleys of the Chiba countryside. Doing my studies I've realised that in the last sixty years almost half of them have been built over. The yato are a habitat of beauty and variety, not only of importance for the rice cultivated there but also for cultural reasons. And this environment is as typical of eastern Japan as the Cotswold fields or Pennine moors are for us in the UK, a landscape of truly international significance.

But developers just can't stop filling it in. Every time you look there's a new retail shed or lorry park been dumped on a thousand year old bit of tanbo.

Well, someone must have liked what I wrote about the issue, becasue I've been selected as a member of the consultative group. Let's hope I can make a good contribution to the conservation of such areas in future. Mark Twain is supposed to have commented "Buy land - they have stopped making it!" With the national passion here for filling in the sea-bed that's not always true of Japan but hey! They have certainly stopped making ancient tanbo along the yato long ago so let's hang on to what we have left. We might need it to feed ourselves soon.