I have almost never seen Japan

from an airplane during daylight hours before. At night, the assorted lights decorate the horizon and emanate a warm beacon of welcome to returnees. In the day, the origin of those lights shows itself. It was breathtaking to me - in the worst way. What were tens of thousands of modest twinkling lights, coming together to form a massive display of Tokyo’s hospitality and sense of togetherness, became thousands of grey, mostly featureless buildings and other city accessories covering the landscape as far as one’s eyes can see.

I glance at the other passengers staring out their windows, gaping at the sight of their own city, and I wonder what they are thinking. Amazement? Horror? Comfort?

I had also still never seen Fuji-san in person before, and I scanned the sight below for it. One or two mountains looked promising at first. Then, from the side of my tiny window, something monstrous slowly creeped into the scene. I simply could not believe the awesome size of what I was looking at, and it made me forget the ugliness of the prior subject for a moment. Mt. Fuji towers above everything, a sky-reaching formation that dwarfs the entire rest of the island’s topography, like a pillar to the heavens. Its snowcap shines with the brilliance and intimacy of the moon. It was immeasurably more inviting than any number of lights the city could offer.

I finally noticed that a heavy smoke was billowing ominously from the sides of the mountain, not unlike clouds seeping out of the cracks from some magical world beneath the earth. The sun shining fiercely on all sides, I thought that it must be steam, evaporation of the snow. One might otherwise mistake it for pre-eruption volcanic activity, that is how much of this steam was pouring from it. I was surprised it had taken me as long as it did to notice it, and became horrified again at what it was suggesting. Starting from immediately outside the mountain’s circumference, the grey boxes covered every inch of land, crowding around the stage to watch the rising stage smoke of the performance high above. Fuji-san is surrounded by an apparent plague of concrete. Imagining the skin of a mammoth creature, I thought to myself, My god, it looks like cancer.

I hate to paint such a picture of any part of a country I have come to endear, but this critical point must be realized of it: Japan threatens itself with forgetting, and forever losing, itself to a development project it no longer needs and is letting continue in dangerous excess.