A city as monstrous as Tokyo can also create powerful urges to make periodic escapes.
Kunitachi City, which is west of Tokyo on the JR Chuo Line and takes roughly 30 minutes to reach from Shinjuku Station, is a pleasant college town home to Hitotsubashi University, a small prestigious national university best known for economics. Many of its buildings are lovely brick buildings from the Meiji era and a stroll through the campus is worthwhile. The broad streets and spacious blocks are a legacy of its postwar period as a US military base. Kunitachi Station is one of the oldest standing and is home in summer to swarms of dive-bombing tsubame (swallows). North of the station is residential land; the majority of businesses and the university are to the south, most along Daigaku-doori (University Street), which heads due south from the station roundabout. Crowds descend on Kunitachi during the cherry blossom season in late March and early April, when Daigaku-doori is lined with cherry blossoms for over a kilometre of its length. Tachikawa, a proper city, is one station further west on the JR Chuo Line.