Hey, first, thanks for the thread Nyororin! It's very interesting browsing through the info here.
I'm curious about the differences between the large cities (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya etc), and smaller places. I'm going to Kanazawa for a year in April (graduate exchange year), and I spent 08-09 in Tokyo as an undergraduate student, so my experiences with Japan was quite urban, except for travelling around in vacations. How do you think a smaller place is to live in? (Some hundreds of thousands in Kanazawa)