2024 is the year of the dragon. It was barely half-a-day old when the dragon lashed out in anger. On the afternoon of New Year’s Day in Japan our cell phones started bleating in unison, high-pitched whooping interspersed with an urgent robotic voice repeating: “Jishin desu. Jishin desu.”

“Earthquake, earthquake.”

We switched on the television. The live feed was already coming in from Ishikawa Prefecture, on the Japan Sea-side of the archipelago. Cameras mounted on the roofs of government buildings and inside train stations and shopping malls were streaming back convulsed images as the ground shook and people ducked for cover. The earthquakes came in waves, aftershock following aftershock.

Near-frantic newscasters shouted into their microphones that the government had issued a major tsunami warning: Anyone near the ocean should run away from it—now! The country watched in horror as tsunamis, looking not so much like waves as grey-black animals emerging from the sea, swallowed up parts of the coastline. Rivers flowed backwards as the tsunamis choked their gullets, black water rising up against bridges and riverbanks. It was March 2011 all over again.

Later, news crews and local social media users gave us a better sense of the damage. The dragon had clawed gigantic cracks into roadways and buckled roadbeds. Several houses had collapsed. A fire at a famous morning market in Wajima City burned out of control, orange-black smoke fuming into the cold night sky. Helicopter footage showed city blocks swamped in the moonlight from where the watery dragons with seawater backs had broken through seawalls and slithered furiously ashore.

Just a dozen or so hours before, television stations had broadcast solemn New Year’s Eve footage from temples and shrines around the country. At Chionin Temple in Kyoto, monks from the Jodo Pure Land sect of Buddhism stood in the light rain, occasionally ringing a gigantic bell while chanting prayers for the alleviation of suffering in the world. Chionin Temple was founded nearly 850 years ago by Honen, a monk who sought to bring people spiritual succor during a time of societal upheaval and bitter civil war. Going on a millennium later, we still need such succor, maybe now more than ever.

From another location, Kumamoto in southwestern Japan, TV viewers could see the restored Aso Shrine standing in dignified splendor, welcoming the crowds of people who had come to make their first shrine visit of the new year. In the spring of 2016, part of the shrine complex collapsed in a violent earthquake. More than seven years have passed, and the shrine is born again. The battering ram of time will have to wait a few more centuries to knock it down—perhaps.

Look back over the sweep of history, here in Japan or any other place, and you will see that we are not at home on this planet. Earth is not a sanctuary but a proving ground. The year of the dragon could be every year, because not a day goes by that we are not beset with strife and sorrow. During every trip around the sun, somewhere the ground shakes, the ocean rears up, flames spread, buildings fall. Empires crumble, ambition soaks battlefields in blood, disease wastes the body, hate poisons the mind. The forces of nature try to kill us, or we try to kill our neighbor. It’s a pitiful race to see which one will finish the job first. With each passing moment we risk being burned by the dragon’s breath, cut to pieces in his jaw.

What we fail to learn from history, the present will teach us anyway. On New Year’s Day 2024 the world beneath our feet was tossed to and fro like a rag doll. The sea came to a cold boil and reached landward, dragging parts of our tiny civilization into the deep. A heater was knocked over onto a tatami mat, or a cooking flame was thrust into a curtain, and soon the grotesque lantern work of the nighttime inferno rose skyward.

On New Year’s Day 2025, we might watch on television as human beings terrorize their fellow men and women, taking over from nature for a time. What remains a constant is suffering, uncertainty. As the year of the dragon begins with chaos and destruction, I watch the survivors huddle under blankets with their families and friends, realizing anew that all we have in this small world is each other.