The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (29 page)

The economic fate of Iceland is uncertain and troubling. One friend there tells me that the already bankrupted banks may go bankrupt again, because their debt is so colossal. The billions in new loans from abroad are terrifyingly large for a country whose population is a thousandth the size of ours, and the Icelandic currency, the króna, is probably doomed.

The obvious solution is for Iceland to join the European Union (EU), and the April elections include a referendum on that question. Doing so, however, would involve letting the EU manage the country’s fishing waters, its traditional and genuine source of wealth. That, in turn, would presumably open those waters up to all European fishermen and to a bureaucracy whose interests and ability to manage Icelandic fisheries are dubious. Iceland fought the Cod Wars with England in the 1970s to protect just those waters from outside fishing, and even in the years when everyone seemed focused on technology and finance, fish still accounted for about 40 percent of the country’s exports.

ARGENTINA AND ICELAND

A recent headline in the British
Guardian
read: “Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets.” From the perspective of those governments, a fully engaged citizenry is a terrifying prospect. From
my perspective, it’s what disasters often bring on, and it’s civil society at its best. I’m hoping Iceland’s going the way of Argentina.

In mid-December 2001, the Argentine economy collapsed. In its day, Argentina had been the poster child for neoliberalism, with its privatized economy guided by International Monetary Fund policy. The economy’s managers, foreign and domestic, were proud of what they’d done, until it turned out that it didn’t work. Then, the government tried to freeze its citizens’ bank accounts to keep them from turning their plummeting pesos into foreign currency and breaking the banks.

The poor had already been politically engaged, and the unions had called a one-day general strike (just as French unions last week called more than 1 million people into the streets to protest job losses in the latest economic crisis). When the banks were frozen, however, middle-class Argentines woke up broke—and angry.

On December 19, 20, and 21 of 2001, they took to the streets of Buenos Aires in record numbers, banging pots and pans and shouting “all of them out.” In the next few weeks, they forced a series of governments to collapse. For many people, those insurrectionary days were not just a revolt against the disaster that unfettered capitalism had brought them, but the time when they recovered from the years of silence and withdrawal imposed on the country in the 1980s by a military dictatorship via terror and torture.

After the crash of 2001, Argentines found their voice, found each other, found a new sense of power and possibility, and began to engage in political experiments so new they required a new vocabulary. One of the most important of these experiments would be neighborhood assemblies throughout Buenos Aires, which provided for some of the practical needs of a now-cashless community, and also became lively forums where strangers became
compañeros
.

Such incandescent moments when people find their voices and power as part of civil society are epiphanies, not solutions, but Argentina was never the same country again, even after its economy recovered. Like much of the rest of Latin America in this decade, it swung left in its political leadership, but far more important, Argentines developed social alternatives and found a new boldness that had previously been lacking. Some of what
arose from the crisis, including workplaces taken over by workers and run as collectives, still exists.

Argentina is big in land, resources, and population, with a very different culture and history than Iceland. Where Iceland goes from here is hard to foresee. But as Icelandic writer Haukar Már Helgason put it in the
London Review of Books
last November:

There is an enormous sense of relief. After a claustrophobic decade, anger and resentment are possible again. It’s official: capitalism is monstrous.

Try talking about the benefits of free markets and you will be treated like someone promoting the benefits of rape. Honest resentment opens a space for the hope that one day language might regain some of its critical capacity, that it could even begin to describe social realities again.

The big question may be whether the rest of us, in our own potential Argentinas and Icelands, picking up the check for decades of recklessness by the captains of industry, will be resentful enough and hopeful enough to say that unfettered capitalism has been monstrous, not just when it failed but when it succeeded. Let’s hope that we’re imaginative enough to concoct real alternatives. Iceland has no choice but to lead the way.

2009

THE GREAT TŌHOKU EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI

Aftermaths in Japan

When I met him, Otsuchi city administrator Kozo Hirani, a substantial, balding man in a brown pinstripe suit, was on the upper floor of a warren of small-scale temporary buildings that now house the town’s administration. To reach him I had flown to Tokyo, taken a train more than three hundred miles north to Morioka, the capital of Iwate Prefecture, then got into a van with seven people from Tokyo’s International University who’d decided to see the disaster zone for themselves and help me while they were at it. Two were continental Europeans, five were Japanese, including one young man with the face of a warrior in a nineteenth-century Japanese print. His only job was to hand over exquisitely wrapped boxes—almost certainly containing some kind of sweet—in pretty shopping bags to everyone we visited, starting with Hirani. A huge cardboard carton of these items had been loaded into the van in which we traveled through the disaster zone.

When the city administrator first saw the wall of black water coming at him, it was so vast and incongruous that he didn’t recognize it for what it was. Hirani survived the tsunami that swept the mayor and most of the small town’s higher-ranking officials away in the middle of the afternoon on March 11, 2011, leaving him with the burden of responsibility for the recovery of his town. “I lost five of my subordinates. One sank in front of me. It was twenty-four hours before the helicopters came,” he told me through an interpreter. “I was rescued by helicopter and when I saw the city from the sky I thought everything was at an end. It is very tough. My subordinates were in their twenties and thirties—I am fifty-five. Why did I survive?” Almost 10 percent of the town’s population of about 15,000 died in the tsunami, one of the highest per capita death tolls in the affected area
along the northeast coastal prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima (which is the name of the prefecture as well as the inland city).

As we approached Otsuchi through mountainous countryside, we saw heavy equipment dismantling wrecked buildings, their twisted steel girders exposed. I thought we must be near the coast, but we kept going for a long time through wreckage and neat hills of debris; in the flatlands nearer the sea not much was left besides foundations. Some buildings were standing here and there, but they didn’t look as though they would be rehabilitated. A few brightly illuminated drink vending machines stood like crazily cheerful sentinels in the ruins. There and elsewhere along the coast, I saw many buildings whose first stories were utterly destroyed, their second stories damaged, and the rest increasingly intact the higher they went. I had been to New Orleans six months after Katrina, before the real cleanup began in many neighborhoods, but the deluge there now seems gentle by comparison. Lined up in the dirt of Otsuchi—in Japan even wreckage is made neat—was a long double row of hundreds of cars, twisted and crushed by the extraordinary force of the sea. In one of the houses, still standing but torn open, I saw a family’s pretty blue and white china dishes, a stack of five-sided bowls, flowered side plates, and a little oval dish, unbroken and unclaimed.

I hadn’t understood that the tsunami, at its height, was 140 feet—40 meters—high. It had been about 33 meters high on the peninsula that protects Otsuchi to the south, and so the wall of water that hit the town, according to a map published in the
Asahi Shimbun
on the anniversary, may have been only about 22 meters high. I say
only
, but that’s a wall of water the height of a seven-story building, and because of the narrowness of the valley and the steepness of its walls, it ran far inland, scouring everything it touched, turning a fishing town into splinters strewn with corpses.

As the tsunami approached, Hirani took refuge in the city hall, which was surrounded by water and out of contact with the rest of the world. “So our biggest worry was what happened to our families.” His wife and father, who lived locally, were okay, though they feared he was dead, as did his children further away. He added with a faint smile, “They now appreciate me much more.” But he lost a lot of his friends. “This loss is so big. We can
rebuild—but the heart, the sorrow.” There were practical things to deal with—cases of burnout among emergency service workers, trauma with all the survivors. One government employee killed himself, and many were in counseling. A friend of Hirani’s had examined 450 waterlogged bodies in the course of looking for his mother. He found her, but it didn’t end there. “In his dreams his mother comes with this changed body and the other bodies come and ask for help.” He took indefinite leave and died in a traffic accident.

From a practical standpoint Hirani thought they should adopt an approach whereby family members don’t look at a body until there is a DNA match. Bodies were still showing up. The previous day they had found two in a car, and officially 470 locals were still missing. Japanese officials are reluctant to classify all the missing as dead, and so the statistics still name thousands of missing along with the nearly 20,000 dead. “We live near the ocean,” Hirani said to me, “and our joy is the ocean. The ocean might get very harsh once in a hundred years, but usually people have respect but not fear.”

Some Sea Shepherd activists trying to document porpoise slaughter in the region were also in Otsuchi on March 11. One of them wrote soon afterward:

The police, who had taken up a post at the only place we could pass, were frantically motioning for everyone to get through the gates in the tsunami wall. We got through. These walls and gates are massive structures that appear to be built to withstand military bombardment. They extend high up into the air and rim the entire harbor area of the town. It was not long before the water drained from the harbor and then refilled. We learned from the firemen to expect to see several cycles of this draining and refilling. The water then rapidly refilled the harbor and rose right up to inundate all of the areas on the water side of the wall. It happened very quickly. It drained again, this time almost down to the mud. Then the returning water pushed past and over the draining water creating a wall of black howling water. This time the water rose even faster and topped the wall. It kept rising up on the hillsides and filling the valleys and crevices beyond. Several times this happened and
all the while aftershocks were happening. Then it started to snow. Mixing in with the snow was ash from the many fires burning in the hills and damaged buildings. The smoke was choking.

They tried to rescue a woman stranded on floating debris and then to direct a boat to get her. But darkness shut them in and they didn’t succeed. Power was out in most of the disaster region and they spent the night in blackness, with the fires gleaming in the hills.

I heard a similar story from a carnation grower in Miyagi Prefecture to the south, who was trying to find his way back to his farm in the darkness that night and heard the cries of trapped people all around him. The roads were blocked with debris, so he walked, through water so cold he went numb, past rubble, past the sounds of the desperate and the dying. He eventually responded to one woman who was pinned against a wall with water up to her neck. He managed to get her to a safer place but ignored many of the others, convinced he could do nothing, torn and consumed with worry about his farm. In the light of day on the 12th he saw “many fires and dead bodies lying on the roadside.” It takes time to get carnations going, and so he had no income last year, but he did at least start growing them again. He complained that those who remained in their own homes, however shattered, did not receive the assistance that the displaced did.

An earthquake can be a great social leveler at first, but policy and prejudice will decide who gets aid and recompense and compassion later, and it will never be equitable, as this farmer knew well. Disaster solidarity often fractures along these lines. But it is important to keep the generosity in mind: Hirani estimated that between 10,000 and 20,000 volunteers had come to his small town alone. Last year young Japanese people were volunteering in large numbers and, at least in some cases, rethinking their ambitions and purpose in life. Every disaster leaves a small percentage of people committed to ideals they might not have found otherwise.

There is no such thing as a natural disaster, the disaster sociologists say. In other words, no matter what the origins of a disaster, human systems—physical, cultural, political—can amplify, channel, or mitigate what happens. In an earthquake it’s not the shaking of the earth but the collapse of
buildings that’s responsible for nearly all loss of human life. Japan may be the best country in the world when it comes to seismic safety codes, and its tsunami alert system worked fine too. They even have an earthquake early-warning system that responds to the P-waves which precede the more damaging S-waves, giving people several seconds to prepare—not much, but maybe time enough to get under a table or into a doorway, pull over to the side of the road, turn off power or gas, take stock.