Yesterday toward evening, I went for a long, blissfully solitary walk. I set off toward Iwakura, a tiny, rural sub-segment of Kyoto Prefecture at the foot of Hiei-zan, Kyoto's tallest mountain. Being late summer, the small rice fields set deep on both sides of the road were tall and green and the tops were almost ripe, bending down and turning golden. Some of the fields' owners -- whose houses must be a long ways off, as behind and around the little paddies were schools, construction sites and new, expensive homes -- had already put up netting to protect the rice from birds, and others had constructed a crazy webwork of wooden poles with black plastic bags tied to the tops like tiny, fluttering ghosts. Connecting all these poles was a long string of metallic ribbon, orange on one side and silver on the other, that flashed and twisted chaotically, never stopping despite the almost nonexistent breeze. To me, it looked beautiful and whimsical, but if I were a bird I imagine it would send me spinning off in the other direction, tripping.

Balancing out this peaceful, pastoral vision was the constant presence of large groups of high school students, uniformed despite the incontrovertible presence of Saturday. The older boys rode small motorbikes and scooters with their legs spread wide, trying to look slouchy and reckless and looking like circus monkeys with their better days behind them; the younger ones rode bicycles with fenders and baskets, skinny boys still wearing their baseball uniforms after practice, trying to convince the world that they were men. The girls arranged themselves with studied carelessness over bicycles and fences, dress shirts untucked and socks pulled up, not primly but with an air of intimidation. Some of them wore gaudily large clips in their pin-straight hair; their faces were tough.

Over the rice fields rose clouds of dragonflies, huge red ones that patrolled around like police cruisers with an audible flick-flick as they turned sharply and wheeled about the other way, and little black ones that mostly rested on things and looked picturesque. The air was filled with the smell of burning grass that rose in clouds from the more distant farms. Everyone was out on the street. A stout woman working in the garden greeted me in kind when I nodded and smiled, and looked surprised with herself afterward; an old man bent fully double ambled slowly down a side road, looking very much like that was his sole duty; fathers walked with their young children after a long and solitary workweek, trailing a bouncy dog on a thin leash; a tired and drained-looking young housewife swooped silently past me on a black bicycle, staring straight ahead, wraithlike in a dark dress and black apron.

On the far side of the road, a wall that had been new last year was mossy and sprouted plants and grass from several places, adding to the pungent smell of green that was everywhere; nearby, what had once been a forested hill was now itself a new, blank wall, with nothing else around to justify its conversion.

This is the middle way between the old Japan we see in pictures and the new Japan we hear about -- the old shrines and smiling Buddhas tucked away in mossy alcoves, the isolated and bullying youths with a consuming need for status and identity, the peaceful summer evenings of cold tea and the sounds of cicadas, and the aimless and hungry construction that eats away at the shreds of untouched land until even Japan's beloved Nature is sculpted, created, wrought. I understand why most accounts only address one Japan at a time, idolizing its serenity one moment and demonizing its modern corruption the next -- both are present all the time, unreconciled, and embracing one side means being constantly shocked by the other. It's more than a phenomenon, it's a national consciousness, a current that runs from the northern tip of the coldest island down through the spine of the country, and it's disturbing and enthralling.

When I came back, it was almost dark, and the hot, humid breeze had gone elsewhere, pushed along by something cooler and greener. The dragonflies had traded themselves in for frogs in the tiny ecosystem of the rice fields, and they chirped and croaked and twanged like rubber bands, the invisible backwater choir. The local print shop, housed in a dusty wooden building hundreds of years old, was just shutting off its lights for the evening, but across from home, the corner convenience store still shone like a beacon, and its rows of coolers and bright magazine racks were immune to the night.