While human beings may color in what we want to see and leave the rest in black and white, this is not an easy task for a camera. Photographers and moviemakers in Japan must carefully calculate how to frame each shot to preserve the illusion of natural beauty. The Japanese are surrounded by books and posters that feature precisely trimmed shots of nature – mostly close-ups of such details as the walkway into an old temple grounds or a leaf swirling in a mountain pool – with accompanying slogans praising the Japanese love of nature, the seasons, and so forth. Often the very agencies whose work is to resculpt the landscape have produced and paid for such advertisements.

Well-selected words and photos remind the Japanese daily that they live in a beautiful country. They also impress upon foreigners who buy books on gardens, flowers, architecture, and Kyoto that Japan is blessed above all nations in the world with its exquisite «love of the four seasons.» No country in the world has so rich a heritage of symbols and literature extolling nature. Signs for restaurants and bars read «Maple Leaf,» «Firefly,» «Autumn Grasses»; a major bank, formerly Kobe Taiyo Mitsui Ginko (Kobe Sun Mitsui Bank), even changed its name to Sakura Ginko (Cherry Blossom Bank). Myriad ceremonies such as Mizutori, the Bringing of Spring Water, at the Nigatsu-do Temple in Nara, survive from traditional culture, and people perform such rituals in private homes and at temples or watch them broadcast in some form or another almost daily on television. From the emperor's ceremonial planting of spring rice on the palace grounds in Tokyo to moon-viewing parties in autumn, millions of people celebrate the passing of the seasons. Shopping arcades hang branches of plastic cherry blossoms in the spring and plastic maple leaves in the fall. But this wealth of seasonal reminders obscures the devastation taking place throughout Japan. It is easy to forget, or never even to notice, that the Forestry Agency is replacing Japan's maples and cherries with sugi cedar, that fireflies no longer rise from concrete-encased riverbanks.

It is impossible to get through a single day in Japan without seeing some reference-in paper, plastic, chrome, celluloid, or neon – to autumn foliage, spring blossoms, flowing rivers, and seaside pines. Yet it is very possible to go for months or even years without seeing the real thing in its unspoiled form. Camouflaged by propaganda and symbols, supported by a complacent public, and directed by a bureaucracy on autopilot, the line of tanks moves on: laying concrete over rivers and seashores, reforesting the hills, and dumping industrial waste. Advancing as inexorably as the «Moving Finger» of Omar Khayyam, the bureaucracy carves its «concepts» upon the land, and neither our Piety nor our Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all our Tears wash out a Word of it.