For many of us, Japan has come to mean crowded trains, high-tech gadgets, efficient systems, cool reserve--a neon blur, in the imagination, of pencil-thin high-rises in which traders in dark suits mutter into cell phones. Or, if not the hard realism of Tokyo's office blocks, then the gossamer romance of Kyoto's teahouses, all exquisite restraint and antique silence. Though both these sides are suddenly in evidence in Olympic Nagano, for most of its life the city and the village venues all around it have offered a down-home, uncrowded, friendly Japan where some of the hard hats along Kencho-dori (Prefectural Office Street)...
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