Here’s a short video clip showing a child-friendly train car in Tokyo. It’s too good to be true, especially in a country where pressure to keep public areas quiet — including train cars — is tremendous.

For me, the most striking things about Tokyo were its silence and its cleanliness. It is all the more noticeable when you come from Israel, where, sadly, love of the land is not always demonstrated by litter control.

In Tokyo, a city of over 12,000,000 residents (not counting workers who come in daily), I saw one — ONE — piece of litter in the street during a 10-day visit. And that was an empty beer can blowing down the street in a typhoon. It’s refreshing and remarkable, although I’m sure there’s a price to pay, as there is in any very clean environment.

[Amusing: en route to a meeting, we collected a granola bar wrapper which we had to carry for 15 minutes through Tokyo Station before finding a trash bin. So very, very clean, and yet so few places to dispose of litter!]

More great pictures of the children’s train at Deputy Dog.