I have shima nagashi syndrome. Maybe you do too...

Refuge and exile are closely related concepts. They both frequently involve involuntary removal - physical, political, psychological - to somewhere remote or strange. Islands, particularly small ones, can make good destinations for refugees and exiles because of their spatial characteristics, such as boundedness and isolation. In feudal Japan some of the more remote of its 6,852 islands were used to isolate people deemed to be troublemakers of one sort or another. "This sense of the outer islands' peripherality led to them being used as places of exile for internal dissidents," writes Juni'chiro Suwa in The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, "resulting in the terms shima okuri or shima nagashi (literally, 'throwing away to an island') being used to refer to political exile."

Being 'thrown away' to an unknown and potentially hostile environment presents significant practical and emotional challenges. Writing in the 1970s, Japanese-American anthropologist Magoroh Maruyama coined the term 'shimanagashi syndrome' to describe "the prisoner's sense of isolation" experienced by those forced into or, in certain instances, volunteering for life in remote or extreme situations. One such extreme situation would be choosing to live on a space settlement built somewhere in orbit between Earth and the moon. "Would immigrants to extraterrestrial communities suffer from the shimanagashi syndrome?" Maruyama asks, in his 1978 article 'Settlements in Space'.

Maruyama was one of many contributors to a significant body of research into the design, construction, governance and development of off-Earth human communities. Detailed engineering studies, such as those conducted by Gerard K. O'Neill at Princeton University, showed that building cities in space was feasible with technology already available in the mid-70s. But that coincided with a resurgence of bitter divisiveness in international relations, after a hint of better things at the time of Neil Armstrong's historic moonwalk. Conflicting policy pressures, political weaknesses and public anxieties led to a decline in the fortunes of space exploration. It's very much back on the cards today, with precisely the kind of collaboration O'Neill predicted would be needed in his 1977 book 'The High Frontier'; between private and public sectors, nations and international bodies, every discipline across the arts, humanities and sciences, and people from every culture and nationality.

Livin' on an island

While this is not the place for a debate on the pros and cons of space exploration, it is worth asking, as Justin McGuirk does in his introduction to the book accompanying the Design Museum's recent 'Moving to Mars' exhibition, "what can we learn from surviving on Mars that might help us survive on Earth?" It is the same question we are struggling to address now. What can we learn from surviving the Coronavirus pandemic that might help us survive in the post-pandemic settlement?

I am currently isolated within isolation, listed as 'clinically extremely vulnerable' because of my medical history, and therefore being 'shielded'. I am on a psychological island, experiencing the dislocation and uncertainties of Maruyama's shima nagashi syndrome. Given how much technology has advanced since space exploration's heyday in the 1970s, we might have expected our response to the pandemic to be slick, hi-tech, even 'futuristic' (a seriously problematic word). Instead it has been chaotic and primitive, more like the 'adhocitecture' of frontier towns described by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, in an interview for the 'Moving to Mars' book, than the imposing 'statement' architecture of our now near-empty city centres.

The desire to learn from what is happening is evident everywhere I look - on social media feeds, in op-eds and thought leadership articles, on websites of almost every political and cultural perspective, in podcasts, TV reports, Zoom conferences and private conversations. Yet I fear that in our rush to find answers we tend to overlook what has already been learned. To paraphrase former Hewlett-Packard CEO Lew Platt, if only humanity knew what humanity knows.

Whatever shape our economic fortunes, professional journeys and personal situations might take from now on, the consequences of shima nagashi will loom large. The task at hand, then, is to turn at least some of those consequences into opportunities, and the prime opportunity is to engage with existing knowledge. As Gerard K. O'Neill notes in 'The High Frontier', rather than expend vast resources on trying to develop new technologies, we should aim to "assemble building blocks of existing technology in such a way as to build a new capability that serves a real need". That applies as much to the basic human technologies of social and organisational systems as it does to the 1s and 0s of digital devices.

Otherwise, there is a danger that shima nagashi could become a bigger threat than COVID-19 in the long run. Living on an island once sounded like the idyllic dream of the super-rich, but in the words of the great bard Francis Rossi, "I'm getting lonely in my empty room... living on an island... working on another line... waiting for my friend to come, and we'll get high..."