Tama New Town, Tama Hills (Pom Poko)

Rice fields and wooded slopes in the foreground, the apartment blocks of Tama New Town's Nagamine estate lining the ridge behind, seen from a Keio Sagamihara Line train in 2014. Pom Poko's raccoon dogs fight a real project: Tama New Town, the vast suburb planned in the 1960s that carved housing estates out of the Tama Hills west of Tokyo. Isao Takahata set the film here, and this mix of surviving farmland and hilltop housing is exactly the border the tanuki are defending. Ride the line through the hills and the film's argument plays out the window.