Crawling from the Wreckage (47 page)

The last time the volcano erupted, in 1949, its whole western side slid four metres down towards the sea, and even now it is still slipping very slowly downwards. Given the scale of the catastrophe if the next eruption sends this mountain crashing into the water, Dr. McGuire is angry that there is so little monitoring equipment on La Palma to give advance warning: “The U.S. government must be aware of the La Palma threat.
They should certainly be worried, and so should the island states in the Caribbean that will really bear the brunt of a collapse.”

“They’re not taking it seriously,” McGuire concluded. “Governments change every four or five years and generally they’re not interested in these things.” It was a classic scene, revisited in every natural disaster movie: crusading scientist calls feckless governments to account, squalid politicos ignore the call. The science journalists couldn’t wait to get their pieces into print.

But hold on a minute. Haven’t we heard about this threat before? What’s new this time? Nothing, except that there hasn’t been a stampede to cover La Palma with seismometers. Now, why do you think that is?

Suppose that the governments whose coastlines are at risk, from Morocco to the U.S., did get a warning that Cumbre Vieja was waking up again. What would they do with the warning? Evacuate one or two hundred million people from the low-lying lands indefinitely?

They don’t know if there is really going to be an eruption (seismology is not that precise), or how big it might be, or whether this will be the one that finally shakes the side of the mountain loose. It could happen in the next eruption, but it might not happen for a thousand years.

No national leader wants to evacuate the entire coast for an indefinite period of time, causing an economic and refugee crisis on the scale of a world war, for what might be a false alarm. But nobody wants to ignore a warning, and perhaps be responsible for tens of millions of deaths. From a political standpoint, it’s better not to have the warning at all.

Natural disasters that can affect the whole planet are known to scientists as “global geophysical events”—gee-gees, for short—and they come in two kinds: ones you might be able to do something useful about, and ones you can’t. When governments are faced with the first kind they can respond quite sensibly.

Since we first realized two decades ago that asteroids and comets smashing into the Earth have caused mass extinctions, a U.S. government project has identified and started to track three thousand “near-Earth objects” whose orbits make them potentially dangerous. In another generation, we may even be able to divert ones that are on a collision course—and if there’s one gee-gee that you would want to prevent above all others, that’s the one. But there’s no similar remedy on the horizon
for volcanoes or earthquakes, or the tsunamis they might cause. About these, we just have to keep our fingers crossed.

We had a very close call with an asteroid strike less than a million years ago: not a near miss, but an actual collision with a monster the size of the end-Cretaceous asteroid that miraculously did not cause a mass extinction. At the International Geophysical Congress in Glasgow on August 18, 2004, Dr. Frans van der Hoeven of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands revealed that a similar asteroid hit Antarctica only 780,000 years ago, a mere blink of an eye in geological time. We are still here for three reasons, all of them flukes
.

First, the asteroid broke up just before hitting the Earth, creating five smaller impact craters over an area measuring 2,100 by 3,800 kilometres rather than a single huge impact crater. Second, most of the pieces melted in the deep eastern Antarctic ice cap before cratering the underlying bedrock, which limited the amount of dust released into the atmosphere. And finally, there was already permanent winter over most of the planet, so it was much less of a shock to the biosphere than it would be if it happened today
.

“The extraordinary thing about this meteor strike is that it appeared to do so little damage,” said Professor van der Hoeven. “Unlike the dinosaur strike there is no telltale layer of dust [in the geological record] that demonstrates the history of the event. It may have damaged things and wiped out species but there is no sign of it.” Apart from the craters, the only indication that something big happened 780,000 years ago is that the Earth’s magnetic field reversed at just that time. I could build a whole religion around a piece of luck that big, but I shall refrain
.

Something very important happened in Japan over the past five years: it stopped being a one-party state. It always had genuinely free elections, of course, but for fifty years (with the exception of a single year) the Liberal Democratic Party always stayed in power. Then it lost the plot, and soon afterwards it lost power
.

The right wing of the LDP was always home for most Japanese nationalists (except the really crazy ones), but they were always kept on a short leash. Then, in 2006, one of their own, Shinzō Abe, became prime minister
.

“We just ignore them!” said the man at the think tank in Beijing, a senior adviser to the Chinese foreign ministry, and burst out laughing.
He laughed because it is a long and daunting list of people to ignore: the American journalists and academics who predict an eventual war with China; the U.S. armed forces, which are transferring more and more hardware to the western Pacific; and the Bush administration officials whose search for allies in Asia to help them “contain China” culminated in a quasi-alliance with India last year. He also has to ignore the counterparts of those people in the Chinese military-industrial complex, who try to use all that foreign activity as evidence that China must pour many more resources into defence. He is a busy man.

The reason he (and most of the Chinese foreign-policy establishment) deliberately ignore them all is because taking the “American threat” seriously and trying to match it would just play into the hands of the hawks on both sides. There is no objective reason that makes a U.S.-Chinese clash inevitable but preparing for it, or even talking too much about it, actually makes it more possible.

It’s an admirably sane attitude, founded on the obvious fact that China would be far worse off in any confrontation with the United States today than it would be in ten or twenty years’ time, when rapid Chinese economic growth will have narrowed the gap between them. So, even if you believe a clash is inevitable sooner or later (which most Chinese analysts don’t), then it’s a good idea to have it much later, not today.

I heard the same argument from half a dozen other influential foreign-policy analysts in Beijing two weeks ago, and this should have been reassuring, if not for the fact that every one of these experts, having patiently explained that there were no threats on the horizon that could deflect China’s “peaceful rise” to great-power status, then added: “except Japan.” That is quite an exception, as Japan has the world’s second-biggest economy and is right on China’s doorstep.

Which brings us to Shinzō Abe, the new prime minister of Japan. Elected as the leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on September 20 and formally installed as prime minister on September 26, he is the youngest man (fifty-two) to occupy the office since the Second World War. Indeed, he only entered parliament thirteen years ago and got his first cabinet-level job just last year.

But Abe didn’t really need to serve a long apprenticeship; he sort of inherited the job. Twenty years ago, his father was foreign minister, and widely tipped as a future prime minister until he was sidetracked by a
corruption scandal and then died relatively young. His grandfather, Nobosuke Kishi, was prime minister in the late 1950s, despite having been identified (but not tried) as a war criminal by the American occupation authorities. And this is not just a political lineage; it’s a clearly defined ideological group within the Japanese ruling elite.

The people around Abe are uncompromising nationalists who insist that Japan must become a “normal” country. By this, they mean that it should stop apologizing for the Second World War; start rewriting school textbooks omitting all the material about war guilt and Japanese atrocities; and start rewriting the “peace” constitution so that Japan’s euphemistically titled “Self-Defence Forces” can legally become ordinary armed forces, able to be deployed overseas.

Prime Minster Abe has even said that it is “not necessarily unconstitutional” for Japan to develop a nuclear deterrent. He advocates even closer military ties with the United States, and worries aloud about the intentions of a stronger China. Abe not only irritates the Chinese, whose relations with Japan are at the lowest point in decades after five years of his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi; he actually frightens them.

No sane Japanese wants to turn the country’s giant neighbour and biggest trading partner into an active enemy, and Abe isn’t mad. But it wouldn’t be the first time that a government has talked itself into a needless military confrontation.

Symbolism matters. If Abe continues Koizumi’s habit of making annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo—which is devoted to the souls of Japan’s millions of war dead, including fourteen leaders who were hanged as war criminals after the country’s defeat in 1945—then many Chinese will conclude that he is a real threat. Koizumi’s official visits to the shrine as prime minister outraged people all over Asia whose countries were occupied by Japan during the war, but the Chinese in particular went ballistic.

Shinzō Abe visited the Yasukuni Shrine privately as recently as last spring. If he visits again as prime minister, Sino-Japanese relations will get even worse, and it will get still harder and harder for sensible people in Beijing to ignore the rhetoric of the American hawks and the warnings and pleas of their own hawks. With a little bad luck, we could be as little as a couple of years away from the start of a new Cold War in Asia.

We had good luck instead, and Abe was quickly gone from the scene: four of his ministers were forced to resign by scandals and a fifth committed suicide within ten months. His successor, Yasuo Fukuda, the son of a former prime minister, also lasted less than a year. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, the Liberal Democrats then chose Taro Aso, the grandson of a former prime minister but a man so prone to blunders and malapropisms that his name “Taro” has become a schoolyard synonym for “stupid.” He lasted as prime minister not quite a year, and by mid-2009 the Liberal Democrats were gone from power
.

Some years ago, a political-science professor at a Japanese university told me that he reckoned you could fit everybody who counted in Japan into one room. There are about four hundred such people, so it would have to be a ballroom. All but a couple would be men, of course—and at least half of them would be there because their fathers and grandfathers were in the same ballroom twenty-five and fifty years ago.

The Democratic Party of Japan (
DPJ
) is headed for a landslide victory in the election on August 30, sweeping the Liberal Democratic Party (
LDP
) out after an almost unbroken fifty-four years in power, but that is the system it must break if it is really going to change Japan. It won’t be easy, especially since Yukio Hatoyama, the
DPJ
leader who will soon be prime minister, is also part of that system. He is the grandson of the prime minister who defeated Taro Aso’s grandfather.

Recent polls by Japan’s biggest papers predict that the
DPJ
should end up with between 300 and 320 members in the 480-seat House of Representatives. That should be a majority big enough to crush all opposition, but it’s a bit more complicated than that in Japan. Not everybody in that small ballroom filled with the four hundred people who matter is a politician.

Most of them are the businessmen who run the giant corporations that used to be called
zaibatsu
(the pre–Second World War industrial conglomerates) and the top layer of senior civil servants—all of whom have been in bed with the
LDP
their entire working lives. In Japan they
call it the “iron triangle”:
LDP
faction leaders, senior civil servants and industrial bosses, all working together to stifle change and keep themselves in power. It’s a hard combination to beat.

The one previous time in living memory when the
LDP
lost power, to a fragile coalition of opposition parties in 1993, the iron triangle immediately set to work to undermine and discredit the new government, and the
LDP
was back in power in eleven months. That isn’t going to happen this time.

The Liberal Democratic Party has presided over fifteen years of economic stagnation since, and people no longer link it with the boom years. Moreover, this time it faces a single opposition party, ready to take over the government. Nevertheless, it will be a miracle if the Democratic Party of Japan can really change the country even with four undisturbed years in power.

About fifteen years ago, when I was young and foolish, I spent a couple of months in Japan pursuing a single question: why was Japan the only developed country outside the Communist world that didn’t have a “Sixties”? (I had just finished a television series, which is the moral equivalent of living in a cave for two years, so I needed to get out a bit.)

Was there something unique in Japanese culture that insulated it from social and political trends elsewhere in the industrialized world? Why were Japanese people still so deferential, so hierarchical, so docile in the face of arrogant power and insolent corruption? Why was Japan, to all intents and purposes, a one-party state?

That was the question I went with, in my ignorance. But everybody in Japan knows the answer: Japan’s equivalent of the Sixties actually began in the 1950s, but it was ruthlessly crushed.

By the 1950s, the Cold War was going full blast in Asia, and the United States was afraid that the youth revolution getting underway in Japan was the prelude to a Communist takeover. It probably wasn’t anything of the sort, but the U.S. was occupying Japan and so took action to stop it.