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.

Well, the plane didn't erupt into a giant fireball and rain down to earth, and the authorities didn't chuck me out by the shirttails at the gate, so it looks like I'm back in Japan!

There was hardly any wait to take off, a credit perhaps to that wonderful Japanese punctuality, or at least to their airline's lack of bankruptcy. Then again, with the quiet hum and whoosh of the contained air and the tacit pre-takeoff consensus on silence among the passengers, I might have been sitting there looking out the window for three hours and not felt a second tick by. It's possible that I arrived in Narita not one second older than I was when I left: it must be something they mix with the air.

The plane does a funny sort of dance before takeoff, racing the huge jet engines two or three times just to go fifty feet on the runway - like a silly cat coiling and adjusting every inch of itself with its eyes on the little foil ball. For whole minutes it sits there deciding which foot to lead with and which is the precise most aerodynamic position for its tail, and finally the moment has arrived for it to deliver the steel-trap coup-de-grace, the bone-shattering fatal blow, and it gives sort of a perfunctory hop and then flops over on the floor well short of the mark. The letdown is palpable, but for all the while the suspense was building, its excitement was your own.

According to JAL's flight map, the entire top half of Canada is a barren, uncharted wasteland. It's easy to see why - the entire top half of Canada is a barren, uncharted wasteland. Nobody lives there. It stretches out in every direction as far as the eye can see - which is really far from an airplane - flat and gray-green, perforated with little round black lakes like shadows at the bottom of hills, but the land is flat and there's nothing there. It looks precisely like someone dragged a glacier over it.

JAL has the best service of any airline I've ever been on. Before meals (which are delicious), they offer soda, cold tea, or various Japanese and Western alcoholic drinks. With the meal they serve a cold drink, and immediately after serving the meal they come around with coffee, Japanese tea and "English tea." Ten minutes later they come by with coffee refills, and five minutes after that they offer both teas again (Japanese in a ceramic Japanese teapot, and English in a takkm elegant metal one - for veracitude) because they realize that most people can't handle two drinks at the same time and didn't take it the first time around. They know this, and build it in to the schedule: they take their passengers' hydration very seriously.

Unfortunately, when flying, one's organs are kind of tense, and it only takes about three sips of water and half an hour before getting to the bathroom becomes one's most urgent objective. And one was stuck in the window seat the entire time. Oy.

Dinner was a tasty and non-poisonous seafood curry with shrimp and tiny scallops, shiitake mushrooms and carrots, rice, salad and some kind of fluffy apple cake which made me happy. Plum wine, then water, then hot green tea, a refill of hot green tea because I accidentally met the flight attendant's eye, then a complimentary bottle of water. And that's saying nothing of breakfast.

The flight attendants have the bestest aprons (tied around their achingly slender selves) -- gray-blue with a pattern of buildings and streets seen from a bird's-eye view in darker gray-blue. Over that are randomly-placed old-fashioned dirigibles in antique yellow hues, flying over the streets and buildings at whimsical angles. How very aeronautical. Aviatory?

All in all it was a very pleasant flight - but I sustained my first casualty trying to wrestle my heavy bag onto the baggage cart, and that casualty was the blood vessels in my right forearm. I got a fantastic twin quasar of a bruise from where the skin got pinched by the sixty-pound suitcase. Unfortunately, the time when one arrives in Japan is always the time when one is least prepared to do so, and really would rather not. If you have to transfer in Tokyo, don't bring any luggage if you can help it, because you will be tired and sweaty and people will be speaking Japanese to you and you will drop it on your foot. And you will want to go home and get into bed and dream of someday flying to Japan.