I just realized how rare it is to hear birds in Tokyo or Kawasaki/Yokohama. On TV this morning, there was a program about a woman who had walked from Nihonbashi in Tokyo to some small town several hundred kilometers away. It took since April. Of course it was for TV and the crew went with her. They had been walking through some woods and heard a bird. As usual on these types of programs, there was some over-reaction/over-acting when she heard it. I almost thought she had never heard a bird before. Perhaps she hadn't.

You can hear crows and pigeons every morning in Denenchofu. When we lived nea Kawasaki, it was the same. But I almost never hear or see songbirds. Along the Tamagawa (river) you can see maybe 2 or 3 other species of birds, but they don't seem to sing much and there aren't so many of them. It those types of things, things to do with nature and wildlife that I miss more than anything else in Japan. Naturally, Japan has both---but not much near Tokyo.