SENDAI, Miyagi Prefecture -- Alfred Weinzierl is the kind of guy who is good to have around when disaster strikes: He can lay his hands on gasoline when there is none, get a connection when telephone lines are down and any number of things. But don't call him a fixer.
SENDAI, Miyagi Prefecture -- Alfred Weinzierl is the kind of guy who is good to have around when disaster strikes: He can lay his hands on gasoline when there is none, get a connection when telephone lines are down and any number of things. But don't call him a fixer.
"Usually fixers get a very good salary for what they do," says the camo-clad, crew cut German who's been among the most distinctive foreign volunteers to show up in Japan's stricken northern Tohoku region.
"I just consider myself blessed because I can interpret between three languages and give advice about the Japanese law. When it all works out, there's no better feeling."
A resident of Japan for 27 years--most of it in Osaka--the 49-year-old sees himself as an activist and adviser on behalf of foreigners dealing with legal problems. It's a task that has kept him busy over the years. But when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck, Weinzierl knew he had to drop everything and go, if only to share his own experience in a previous disaster: The Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, which rattled Osaka but devastated nearby Kobe.
Weinzierl was on the ground and on the phone early during that crisis, gathering essentials such as fuel and communications from international firms to hand on to the city's foreign residents and volunteer groups.
"What I learned from Kobe is that politicians are an incompetent bunch and that people here like to hold meetings and talk before they finally move," says Weinzierl, whose rough-rider response to disaster can be summed up by the name of a small Osaka-based group of volunteers he formed soon after 3/11: The Reneg-aids.
"I'm not good at doing anything else than what I do. I'm a terrible businessman and I'm not good at wearing suits, but when there's an emergency something always happens. I find myself in the right place at the right time."
This time, he says, fortune found him over the airwaves: Three days after speaking on a German radio broadcast the German charity group Human Plus called him "out of the blue," asking him to oversee more than 20 tons of emergency supplies on their way to Sendai port.
For Weinzierl, the Tohoku disaster has revealed much about Japan's foreign community. In Osaka, he saw an influx of multinational expatriates and consular staff putting distance between themselves and the radiation threat in Tokyo.
"I went to Tohoku because I wanted to show Japanese that there were foreigners also going the other way," north, says Weinzierl. "I can completely understand why they left. If your company sends you here or you're a trainee, you have no roots, you're free to go. When there's a crisis in another country the Japanese there always return, and no one calls them 'flyjin' (a foreigner who flies away)."
In Tohoku, he saw a turnaround from the situation he witnessed in Kobe, where foreign residents, among them long-term Koreans and recently arrived Vietnamese refugees, worried about how they would be treated by neighbors and authorities. After the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, thousands of foreign residents--mostly Koreans--where massacred after rumors spread that water wells were being poisoned by them.
"In Kobe, Japanese shared what they had. I saw rightist trucks set up in front of a Vietnamese camp and start making curry rice for everyone," says Weinzierl. "After the tsunami, it was our turn to do the same."
Foreign residents from all over the country quickly set up aid runs--sometimes much faster than Japanese could do themselves--and afterward got down to digging.
A year later many are still at it.
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This concludes an eight-story series of "3/11 FOR FOREIGNERS."