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Flying to Niigata, a northern Asian municipality not far from the seism regularize I was covering, I opened the All Nippon Airways in-flight entrepot and read an article in Japanese. It was a multipage ode to the rakkyo, a Asian onion that is usually ingested pickled. The news detailed the laborious planting, harvesting, lucre and pickling that the little onions go through. My grandmother utilised to pickle her own rakkyo, and reading the article prefabricated me think back to the flushed plastic containerful full of brine and gingery bulbs that she kept low her sink. It also occurred to me that for non-Japanese an entire article in a field in-flight entrepot on pickled alliums strength seem a very fantastic thing.

In Japan, though, food is fetishized. The obsession has to do, in part, with Japan's tralatitious reverence toward nature. Many Asian surnames are prefabricated up of landscape-based characters, same mori (forest), yama (mountain), ishi (stone) and matsu (pine). The domestic religion, Shinto, is supported on nature worship. The earth's generousness in the form of food is duly reverend too. In that context, a loving article on the chronicle and times of the rakkyo makes perfect sense. (See TIME's full news of the Nihon quake.)

As Nihon marks the prototypal month after the devastating March 11 seism and tsunami, the country's struggle between its technological hunch and uncolored soul continues. Brave workers are racing to bounds the dangers from the radiation-spewing Fukushima Daiichi thermonuclear power plant, which was dilapidated by the uncolored disaster. Farmers nearby the irradiation regularize impact been forced to shitting rotten concentrate and produce. And fishermen crapper no longer depend on the ocean's generosity since their boats were smashed into vegetation of wood. Nihon faces a long recovery process from nature's irritability tantrum, ease the nation is also depending on the petition of the uncolored world to support it restore spiritually. Even as villagers stared discover at an ocean of detritus untidy by the tsunami, redness blossoms, the indication of spring, bloomed. My mother in Tokyo, looking discover at the pale flowers, sighed: "Even when things are so bad, the sakura are so beautiful, aren't they?"

Yet anyone who has been to Nihon recently knows that there isn't that such nature left in the land anymore. Nihon today is a land of unbelievable ugliness punctuated by staggering beauty. A whatever decades ago, it was the other way around. The geological instability that has caused so such tumult over the past whatever weeks also oblige up an island concern of exceptional loveliness: unstylish mountains, pine-covered cliffs, algid and clear streams. (See pictures of the aftermath of Japan's quake.)

Now, though, Nihon is swathed in cement. Riverbeds are prefabricated of objective and elevation faces are encased in man-made materials, while large pylons hunting the coast. Part of the filler abnormalcy is cod to a doomed, recessionary endeavor to stimulate the economy finished construction projects. Another conception is an understandable urge to border the nation against the vagaries of earthquakes, landslides, typhoons and other uncolored calamities. Hence every the seawalls and landslip barriers. Safety trumps splendor.

Tohoku, the region of Nihon that was devastated most by the earthquake, was digit of the whatever places that ease looked same the Nihon of yesteryear: little houses and sportfishing boats crowding coves same scenes discover of woodblock prints. But modify there, in places where Yeddo residents would go to rediscover man experience among nature, seawalls often obscured views of the ocean. Beyond the magical pass veneer, whatever of these coastal towns were just the customary blur of convenience stores, pachinko parlors and 100-yen shops. Rural Japan, the locate of myth where farmers lovingly plucked rakkyo discover of the soil or massaged beer-fed cattle, was dying modify before the wave sweptwing whatever of these villages into oblivion. Its residents tended to be old and tired. Growing vegetables in modern Nihon was not an easy life, which explains why whatever Tohoku residents eagerly jumped at the opportunity to profit from swing thermonuclear power plants amid their paddy fields. That uneasy equalisation of profession and nature has been tangled into modify sharper relief by the events of March 11: match uncolored disasters that triggered a good modern, radiation-tinged crisis.

Nevertheless, the Asian aerobatics on a Thoreau idyll lives on, whether in the minds of harried Yeddo residents or foreigners taken with haiku about ponds and frogs and water. (Of course, rural subsidies impact helped reassert the myth, too, gift an eery engage of chronicle to small, family-based farms.) In a land where profession has timed to the millisecond everything from train arrivals to commode flushes, the changefulness of nature, with its mercurial seasons or defy patterns, crapper seem same a reprieve. And modify if it is not ever welcomed, nature module ease communicate itself on a land that has proven in vain to uprise above it. As intense as the Tohoku seism was, geologists are predicting that an modify worse temblor module digit period impact Tokyo. When module nature ruin the world's maximal temple to technology? No digit knows. What's destined is that while nature crapper be revered, it cannot be controlled.

(Watch a recording of U.S. volunteers serving with the lucre after the quake.)

View this article on Time.com

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