At night, Tokyo's famed Ginza retail and nightlife quarter still looks like an abandoned film set; blackouts and a lack of clientele conspire to extinguish its blare and shimmer. By day, however, signs of life are emerging just over a fortnight since the March 11 earthquake plunged Japan into its worst post-war crisis. On Sunday morning, shoppers came out from metro stations across the district, like rabbits surfacing from burrows to sniff the air after danger has passed.
They are a reminder that, slowly but surely, the world's third-largest economy is getting back on its feet. Assuming - with a healthy dose of caution - that the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant is somehow stabilised within weeks, it is worth considering the strategic and economic impact of the disaster.
For a nation often described in terms of perpetual malaise, the crisis has put Japan's higher virtues on display to the world - the calm and stoic nature of its people along with their resourcefulness, organisation and discipline.
Their government, too, has responded in a robust, ordered and relatively transparent fashion, despite ongoing troubles and question marks. Grave concerns about the management of Fukushima by the Tokyo power monopoly, Tepco, both long before and during the reactor trouble are rightly being voiced, but it is hard to lay that all at the government's door.
The bottom line is that it is difficult to imagine any nation, of whatever stripe, performing better given the tragic troika of events that unfolded on March 11. Certainly neither Britain nor the US have covered themselves in glory during recent calamities on a smaller scale, such as the European snowstorms or the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. And a scenario involving a partial meltdown of reactors at a Chinese nuclear plant does not bear thinking about in terms of transparency.
With many key factories still shut or damaged, rolling blackouts predicted until at least May and tourism obviously hit, the short-term outlook is mixed. But government, World Bank and private-sector analyses all point to a recovery in the third quarter.