When this morning’s earthquake hit, the first, banal, thought that flashed into my head as we drove east from Niigata was that, after months of squealing, the car’s power steering had finally packed-up.

Heaved sideways by some invisible force, we veered dangerously between two lanes before I noticed that the lorry 200 yards ahead was also lurching about. It should have clicked sooner: in Japan - the world’s most seismically active country – it’s never the steering that’s to blame.

Further down the Kan-Etsu expressway, massive dot-matrix screens confirmed (with cartoonish pictures of cars bumping around on a rubberised road) what we had guessed – that the area we were currently driving through had been on the edge of a huge 6.8 magnitude earthquake.

Most alarmingly, said the grave voice on the radio, the country’s largest nuclear power station on the northern coast of Niigata appeared to be on fire – the nightmarish combination of a horribly earthquake-prone country and a heavy reliance on atomic energy.

Waiting for the all-clear from Tepco – the power utility that runs the nuclear power plants in central Japan – has become easily the most tense part of any quake aftermath. Ariel shots, continued the announcer, showed flames and a plume of black smoke licking up from a building to the side of the reactor.

Minutes went by. It was a transformer that had burst into flames. The reactors at Kashiwazaki plant had shut down automatically when the quake began, along with reactors at two other nuclear power stations in the area.

There followed the more traditional blitz of news. Hundreds injured and the number rising. Trains overturned. Roads covered by mudslides and rendered all the more damaging by the heavy rains of the weekend typhoon. Vast gullies cleft across a sports field as the earth literally ripped itself apart.

It was a national holiday, so offices and commuter lines were deserted but the damage still looked grim. There were tsunami warnings along the coast and the threat of a full week of strong aftershocks.

Uniformed troops, members of Japan’s rarely seen self-defence forces, had taken to the streets of rural Niigata towns in military vehicles. Prime minister Shinzo Abe, electioneering in Nagasaki, had run to his car and was spirited back to Tokyo by helicopter. Later wearing fatigues, he headed towards the epicentre.

With a chill, we learned that two women were dead in Kashiwazaki – the town just a few miles from our previous night’s Ryokan inn.

As the day wore on, Japan as a nation embarked on its now well-rehearsed response: a quiet, unhappy acknowledgment that a tremor of this violence would kill and injure on a possibly huge scale. Followed by the all-too human curiosity over what a Buddhist temple or a rubbish incinerator or a school building or a family home actually looks like when its walls are shaken to dust and the roof collapses.

Japanese television, which is ever-ready to provide precisely these images, did not disappoint. Here was a school where an orchestral performance was interrupted by the crazy rattling of the building. There was a street of homes where hundreds of metres of heavy stone walls had collapsed like cardboard. By evening, there were shots of the crowded school gyms and municipal halls where residents had taken shelter.

Earthquakes are a part of life in Japan: it builds with them in mind and has warning systems that are the envy of the world. This was a nasty quake, but provided further evidence that Japan copes with its seismic lot better than anyone.

But, as ever, the helicopters captured the most disturbing aspect of any quake: the randomness of the destruction. Worst is the pull-away shot of the worst-affected towns where one or two houses are rubble (with those chilling glimpses of recognisable household items poking out) and the homes around them are intact.

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