Nakamachidai, where my brother is living during his stay in Japan, is a new town. You could call it a suburb of Yokohama which in turn is a suburb of Tokyo.

The town’s newness is evident when I make my first gentle tour of the area: gentle because of the heat. Together with Judy, my sister-in-law, I walk through the bamboo forest close by, arriving quite soon in farmland. The farmland intrigues me. This is not an area in which you find paddy fields. Rather, plots of land look like large allotments or market gardens.

We visit several temples, from the large new temple just down the road to the tiny temple tucked away in the hills above the new main road. You quickly realise when you look at what Japan has to offer to the visitor that you won’t be short of temples to visit (or, come to that, of noodles to eat). And all on the way to Ikea.

I am reminded today of this recent history of local change. I take time to visit a small shop I have passed most days and buy four small bowls. The woman who serves me is selling edamame beans and gives both Judy and I the gift of a bag of beans, fresh from her farm that morning.

This is also a reminder that, wherever I go in the world, the kindness of strangers, freely given, has the power to cross barriers of language and culture and in this way to make friends of us all.