The View From Rural Japan – a Guest Post By Francis Turner
As the real wuflu pandemic fades away, even though the control freaks try to keep the fear alive, it’s probably useful to look at how the wuflu affected places not covered by the news. As it happens I have had a ground floor view of how the wuflu and associated covidiocies affected rural Japan because I live in Shimane prefecture – in Western Japan.
Compared to many places Shimane has been barely affected by the wuflu in direct terms. I think we’re still at way under 1000 cases (~800?) and 2? deaths. In other words more people in Shimane have died from house fires or traffic accidents than the dreaded wuflu. Looking back to early 2020, Japan was where we saw the first wuflu cases in a controlled non-communist place – to whit the Diamond Princess. Possibly as a result of that experience, possibly as a result of other, things Japan has generally speaking had a remarkably low number of wuflu fatalities and not that many cases. Shimane (pop 650k), has as I noted above, effectively no cases with cumulative infections in the 0.1% range and serious illness/death being a rounding error. Japan as a whole isn’t much worse: deaths are currently around 15,000 total which works out at a bit under 10/100k population and total cases are about 1 million which is under 1% of the population. I know a handful of people outside Japan who died of/with the wuflu and more who have had the disease badly enough to require hositalization. I know of no one in Japan that has had a positive test.
One of the key differences between Japan and most other countries is that most things did not “lockdown”, and to the extent that there was a lockdown it was either short-lived, local or both. This doesn’t mean that widespread covidiocy has not occurred (and is not still occurring) but the national government has not ever told the entire country to cower at home the way governments in Europe did. To the extent that the country did “lockdown” in April 2020, with almost all schools, restaurants and bars closed (along with various other offices), it was temporary and did not last beyond mid May. It may have been slightly more than “15 days to flatten the curve” but it wasn’t more than 45. That national kind of lockdown has never been repeated and the lockdown as a whole has been a lot less that that seen in other places such as Europe. Even in regions where “states of emergency” have been declared – Tokyo and environs, other urban prefectures mostly – most people worked most of the time. People have been encouraged to maintain “Soshiaru Distansu” and to “Terewaak” where possible, so the hordes of Salarymen (and women) commuting to the office has dropped dramatically. The floods of salarymen going out in the evening with colleagues to get drunk together on expenses has shrunk to a trickle, and in fact large chunks of the travel/hospitality sectors are on life support, but factories, warehouses and so on have generally remained at full activity, so Japan has not see the massive drop in GDP etc. that we have seen elsewhere.
In late March-May 2020 most (all?) schools in Japan closed for a few weeks (though April was also the spring vacation so the total time closed was probably three weeks or so) but sanity prevailed and they have not generally shut again – some individual schools that have been the center of a “crustaa” of cases have partially or completely shut for 14 days to cut out the cluster. Here in rural Japan
..the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school
has been a constant after May 2020, just as it was in the past. Admittedly now the schoolboy (or girl) will typically be wearing a face mask (often around his or her chin) while creeping like snail but that is about the limit of the impact. School and after-school activities like baseball or band practice have continued, exams have taken place as normal and so on. This year graduation ceremonies took place (with spacing and a lack of parents to applaud). Last year key inter-school competitions like the national high school baseball championships were either cancelled or took place in a much reduced form. This year, despite a recent rise in cases, the events are taking place more or less as normal though I believe there are limits on the numbers of supporters allowed to attend.
In other words, and this pretty much sums up Japan’s general reaction to the pandemic, the wuflu has only been allowed to nibble at the edges rather than take over the entire culture.
Personal Experience
So what does that mean to someone living here?
Mostly little change beyond the universal mask wearing virtue signalling and related pointless sheets of vinyl/perspex everywhere. Every business has a bottle of alcohol to spray over one’s hands as one enters and many people take advantage of it. Many public places also have an automated temperature taker thing at the entrance and you get a bing as you enter. As with the alcohol rinse this is semi-optional in that I’ve observed people skipping the scan and not being told to go back and do it, but most people comply. I think a lot of this is communal virtue signalling: the business shows that it cares not to infect its customers and the patrons show that they don’t want to infect the business or other patrons.
Masks are universal in public places but discipline in general is sloppy and getting sloppier. The local Kuroneko Yamato delivery bloke (delivering Amazon etc.) has his mask below his nose if not around the chin and he doesn’t care that the person he delivers to has no mask on at all. People walk around shops with their mask below their nose. People take their masks off when they are served the first drink in a restaurant and never put them back on until they leave. Last year people out hiking in the mountains often wore a mask, or put one on when passing another group of people, this year we just say “konichi wa”. And so on. Masks were worn a lot more seriously 12 months ago, now it seems like most people are just going through the motions, which is something that outsiders won’t realise when looking at the statistics.
Mass events (theatre performances, sports events) have mostly resumed in 2021 after being cancelled in 2020 – some (e.g. baseball) resumed in September/October of 2020 and despite waves of increase in 2021 most have continued to occur with an audience throughout 2021, though not in places like Tokyo. In fact that’s been typical. More spectator events take place in smaller towns than in larger cities. One notable example was the Olympics where events in Tokyo had no spectators but those in more distant locations (e.g. the marathon in Hokkaido) did. This is actually logical given that the Wuflu has spread much more in the larger conurbations and is an example of the Japanese government’s general decentralization of health to prefectures and municipalities. Shockingly Japan has figured out that rules for densely populated Tokyo (16,000p/sq mile) make no sense in Shimane (<50p/sq mile) and has in large part left it up to the local governments to decide what health/quarantine measures should be applied.
Back to mass events. Typically these mass events have a reduced audience with one seat in two kept open to do the social distance thing and everyone has to have their temperature taken by one of the scanner gun things on entering. Inside everyone in the audience wears a mask (when not eating or drinking) no matter whether the event takes place in a small auditorium or a large open-air baseball stadium. The singing at sports events has been stopped, which is a pity, but at times/places without a specific state of emergency, that, the masking and the limited capacity are the only differences to pre-Wuflu. At baseball, the beer girls still deliver and despite the pleas to not crowd, fans leaving the stadium are just as packed together as normal. Some events insist that you give contact details which I’m pretty sure only have maybe 50% compliance with regarding an accurate name/address etc. I’m not sure what the Japanese equivalent of Mickey Mouse is but I suspect he’s been attending a lot of events.
There have been zero supply chain issues for daily goods, after the brief toilet paper panic in early 2020 (February) and the subsequent mask shortage (March/April 2020). Some more specialized goods are harder to get (e.g. certain bicycle components and frames are not always available, just as is the case in other parts of the globe) but we aren’t seeing any obvious inflation or increases in prices. Having said that though, gasoline and diesel have gone up in price after being unprecedentedly low in 2020. Prices at my local “gasoline stand” are now ~150Y/liter which is a significant rise off their lows a year ago of around 120Y/L and slightly higher than they were in late 2019 (IIRC ~145Y/L)
Really in Shimane, the main difference between now and 2019 is the lack of tourists which brings us to…
The Leisure Sector
Travel, hotels, restaurants, bars and so on are the sector that has really been hit hard by the wuflu. Basically package tourism stopped dead in April 2020 as did business travel and most business entertainment and none of that has come back in the year plus since, with the partial exception of a few package tour trips briefly between waves of wuflu. A number of leisure sector businesses, mostly ones run by elderly proprietors, shut in April 2020 and have never re-opened. Many bars/restaurants have come up with takeout menus and local craft breweries and sake makers have aggressively moved into online sales. Many larger establishments are also struggling and have cut employees. Both JAL and ANA seconded a number of their ground staff at local airports to other organizations and the local Matuse area bus/taxi/rail company Ichibata has had big problems and may eventually go bust because it has seen its tour bus and other tourism related business fall off a cliff. I’m sure other companies that I haven’t seen in the news have also had problems but the large hot spring resorts (e.g. Tamatsukuri Onsen in Matsue) were in the news last the winter noting their lack of customers.
To their credit the government, both national and local, have realized that there is a problem and come up with ways to try and soften the blow. The main thing they did last year was provide various ways to subsidize people going out and eating/drinking/staying at hotels. The schemes have differed in precise implementation but essentially as a customer you buy several thousand yen of coupons with a discount of somewhere between 20% and 60% which you then spend at the leisure establishments of your choice. Interestingly some schemes have had two discount components. First you get a discount purchasing the coupons or booking online using special booking codes, then once you arrive at your destination you get a few Y1000 vouchers (the number depends on the campaign and the amount of the booking) that you have to use before midnight the following day. The vouchers are usually redeemable at the hotel/ryokan for drinks or souvenirs (omiyage) and may also be used at other places too such as (some) local convenience stores, souvenir shops etc.
I have no idea how well this has worked generally but it certainly incentivized the wife and I to do more weekends away than we might have done otherwise and from observation we are far from alone in so doing. We’ve also tended to go up market a bit (e.g. we went to a posh Tamatsukuri ryokan in February which would normally be well out of our price range, but with the various subsidies was now nicely affordable) and in total have probably spent more money on domestic tourism and entertainment than before. On the other hand I’ve had zero business trips and zero foreign business/leisure trips so we’re probably still spending less in total.
As I understand it various local governments have also spent wuflu funds directly subsidizing the salaries of some travel company employees by having the employees seconded to their tourism bureaux. Unlike countries such as the UK where people have been paid to stay at home, in Japan these seconded personnel have had to do things. Some of it may be a bit make-worky (e.g. tarting up a local airport) and the work may not be quite as strenuous but overall the principle has been that you have to show up and do something to continue to get your salary.
Overall I think this approach has been pretty good. I know there have been establishments that have fallen through the cracks; for example the large chain izakayas for example have generally reduced their numbers of employees because even with the incentives to eat out they haven’t seen enough custom to make up for the lack of business boozing, but no scheme can be perfect. However in general the schemes have kept the majority of the leisure sector alive and the incentives have been well targeted to keep most people in the sector doing more or less the same job they were always doing at more or less the same wage. As a result, combined with the fact all other businesses have continued as normal, there has been no need for secondary fixes such as eviction moratoria for lack of rent payment because almost everyone has still kept their job and thus the ability to pay rent. I’m sure a number of tour bus drivers have taken jobs driving delivery trucks and I have no doubt that a number of people that worked as waiters or similar have redeployed to deliver food and, as noted above, there are certainly a fair number of small establishments that have gone for good but there hasn’t been the mass dislocation that I understand to have occurred in other countries.
From the news (I can’t personally confirm) it seems that people are now flying within Japan in fairly large numbers for the first time since early 2020. This is a difference between now and early May. Then we had to attend a funeral in Tohoku at short notice and, despite it being “Golden week” – normally a time when every flight / hotel etc. is fully booked – we were able to book flights, rental car and hotel with no problem at all despite the lack of notice. If the funeral were occuring now I suspect things would be rather different.
Vaccines and Recent Developments
Unlike the UK, USA and Israel, Japan has been fairly slow to vaccinate. It has, however, followed much the same strategy of vaccinating the healthcare sector and the vulnerable elderly first and then moving on down the age cohorts. Although things got off to a slow start for any number of mostly bureaucratic reasons, the organization seems to be pretty good and the program is now chugging along solidly. Since this is a public health matter implementation has been local. This has led to some differences in speed of vaccination. For example the town my in-laws live in vaccinated essentially the entire population of the town by the end of May, while the city I live in has yet to vaccinate most people under 60. As far as I can tell Japan as a whole has now vaccinated pretty much everyone in the health/elderly care sectors and everyone who wants a shot who is over 60. It’s probably more like everyone over 55 and it looks like it everyone over 40 or so will have had the opportunity for at least one shot by the end of August and be fully vaccinated by late September.
There has been a certain amount of vaccine skepticism. The Japanese have historically not been very trusting of vaccines and this has spread to the Wuflu ones. One of the reasons why vaccination took so long to get started was that the government insisted on additional trials in Japan (another, allegedly, was that the Japanese companies that make the needles and syringes, after making sure that no unreliable Chinese needles would be used then failed to ramp up their own production) but take up among the elderly has been very high. It looks like, as with other countries, take up amongst the younger generations will be lower.
Happily there does not seem to be a serious push for mandatory vaccine passports or mandatory vaccinations (an optional vaccine passport for international travel is available). In fact overall the Japanese government bodies have treated their citizens as intelligent people who can make their own mind. Data on cases, deaths, hospitalizations etc. have been made available and there are a number of good governmental places with collections of statistics. Most are in Japanese of course but Tokyo, thanks to it’s relatively large population of foreigners, has a nice English language site with most of the relevant stats for Tokyo. The treating of the population as grown-ups is probably another difference between Japan and most other places and it is, I believe, the main reason why the current round of states of emergency in Tokyo, Osaka etc. is being somewhat ignored.
The reason is summed up in these graphs above from covid19japan. Despite an ongoing rapid spike in cases deaths remain under about 20/day.
Aside: It is worth considering how Japan compares with other countries. Japan is now seeing ~15,000 cases a day. This is 10/100k of the population more or less and yet is the worst it has ever been. Compared to almost any other country that is exceptionally low as in about an order of magnitude lower than other places. For reference the UK, having recently seen a large FALL in cases, reports (according to the official gov.uk website) about 270/100k
Back to Japan. If you dig into the Tokyo numbers you see that the same disconnect between deaths and cases also applies to hospitalizations.
Hospitalizations have slightly more than doubled since the start of July while new infections have risen eightfold. A similar metric applies for “Patients with severe symptoms” which have tripled to a massive 150 out of some 35,000 people currently considered to be infected.
Another graph (from Tokyo, but in Japanese) shows the breakdown by age decade and week (up to the week including July 27).
The yellow (and black) are the over 60s to over 90s. In April these ages were about 15% of the total infected, by the end of July this fell to about 5% and a graph I saw on TV but can’t find online had that number dropping even lower in the last 10 days or so. Since the over 60s are also (as with other countries) about 90% of the seriously ill and dead, if the numbers of over 60s who are infected remains low then so do deaths.
It seems to me that the Japanese, particularly the younger Japanese are basically done with Covidiocy. Yes they’ll conform to social norms and wear some kind of mask when out on the street, but in a more private setting like a favorite bar or karaoke box, they discard the masks and the norms. Given that these places tend to be precisely the places that are ideal for the virus to spread (enclosed, crowded, poorly ventilated…) it is no surprise that cases are increasing. But since the elderly are vaccinated, even if they are catching the Wuflu they aren’t generally getting seriously ill or dying. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that the majority of susceptible individuals (i.e. the elderly) have been vaccinated and I suspect that the younger Japanese have consciously or subconsciously figured this out.
Lessons from Japan
Some people may look at Japan and draw the conclusion that masks work because masks have been universal. I’m not sure that is necessarily the case, but I think the attitude behind the (original) universal masking may have been key. That attitude was basically to avoid the three Cs in the illustration below
Also my personal observation suggests that people who worked around the elderly were particularly rigorous in avoiding potential infection and they did test/self-isolate if they thought they might have been infected. They also appear to have taken hygiene and disinfection really seriously. They sanitized surfaces, the washed hands, they took care not to cough on their charges (or indeed anywhere in the vicinity) and so on. Relatedly, unlike New York (or the UK), old people who tested positive were hospitalized in isolation units and kept there until they were either dead or recovered instead of being discharged back to a care home or similar. In fact hospitals isolated all wuflu cases and took great care to not have the infection spread in them too. Thus, although elderly people did catch the wuflu, the infections were one-offs and did not lead to mass infections of other elderly.
In other words (see the graph above about Tokyo infections by age group), everyone tried to keep the elderly from getting infected and most people tried to limit spread by not hanging around in places where the virus could spread.
I do think that there are probably other reasons too. Japanese people, including elderly Japanese people, have fewer comorbidities than others. They tend not to be fat, diabetic or other health issues that are known to be predictors of serious wuflu infection. Indeed Japanese are on the whole more active and spend more time outdoors than other places I have lived so being low in vitamin D is rare. I suspect that the Japanese diet may help too. The wuflu has tended to kill people with “one foot in the grave”. Japan has more centenarians than other countries and way more healthy active old people and comparatively fewer with “one foot in the grave”. I suspect that these are related to the lower levels of wuflu infection.
It is possible, likely even, that the Japanese total infection rate is higher than the statistics report. However I suspect that while there may have been asymptomatic cases, I suspect that because of all the hygiene and 3Cs avoidance, most of these hypothetical asymptomatic cases will not have spread the virus to anyone else. Although there have been a few cases of senior politicians etc. breaking their own wuflu restrictions, in general neither they nor anyone else did break the guidance last year. The government didn’t ram through unconstitutional lockdowns and it didn’t issue hysterical ever-changing guidance. Instead, it asked the Japanese people to think of others and, in very large part, the Japanese did. There may have been a fear of being shunned for spreading the virus to help incentivize voluntary compliance but Japan is a very high-trust society (yes you can lose your wallet on the street and get it back with all its money in it) and so people have been able to trust that everyone around them has been following the guidance.
Conclusion
I do think that the current rise in cases is because people have simply stopped following the guidance so strictly and I think the reason for that is that there has been a general realization that if they get ill they won’t kill grandma anymore. I also think that this realization is essentially correct because we’re seeing very much the same sharp rise in cases without similarly steep rises in fatalities or hospitalizations elsewhere too. If the politicians have any sense (and evidence to date suggests many don’t) they’ll announce that restrictions are no longer necessary and try and get ahead of the crowd.
According To Hoyt 
Dr. Daniel Stock had an important message tonight on Tucker Carlson:
“You can’t hide from the virus.”
Neither by putting a diaper on your face, nor by wrapping a towel around your head. Viruses are everywhere, including this one. It’s never going away. All the political panic and idiotic ‘mandates’ did no good, and a great deal of harm.
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A good Zombie Apocalypse novel is at least as believable as anything we’ve heard out of the ‘Publick Health Authoriteez’ over the last year and a half.
“You can’t hide from the virus.”
In the UK it has been semi-officially admitted that they intend to let the virus spread as widely as possible this month so as to be reasonably assured of herd immunity once schools restart in September and then the nights lengthen and the regular flu season stuff kicks off.
This looks like it will be what Japan gets, but probably not intentionally.
This winter we get to see whether the vaccines and/or prior infections really do offer the protection they should do. I’m pretty sure they will but I could be wrong
Pfizer’s own 6 month trial with 45,000 participants shows that the vaccine does not work…14 dead from Covid in the unvaccinated group, and 15 dead in the vaxxed group…The CDC director has stated the same, so it’s official…And as to herd immunity, the US has been administering flu shots for decades, but no herd immunity because the flu is actually many similar viruses that are constantly mutating…But there is some cross immunity amongst the various coronaviruses, but not from the shot…
Wait, seriously? Then what was the point of it, at all?
Mass Murder.
Actual infection does seem to produce immunity in most cases and the immunity is both broad and long lasting. There have been a number of studies done (from memory in Spain and the UK) where they tracked people who had been infected to see if they got the virus again. In the cases where they did, it was almost always with no or minimal symptoms. We’ve also seen that people who have been infected with the original SARS or with some other coronaviruses seem to be protected against the wuflu.
What I think we’ll see in places like the UK and Israel is that the current Delta wave will reinforce the immunity of many by exposing them to a new strain why they are still protected against really bad outcomes by the vaccines
Those are total deaths in both groups including, for example, metastatic cancer. If you look at the table on causes of death, they attribute two deaths in the placebo group to COVID and one in the vaccinated group to COVID-related pneumonia.
Roughly a tenth as many infections reported in the vaccinated group, with acknowledgment that efficacy appears to have been falling off over time.
If the U.S. could get rid of Fauxi perhaps we could get to actual herd immunity and perhaps TPTB can accept that this is a nasty version of the flu and move forward. Lots of “perhaps” in there, I know. Here in PA, the pulling of the governor’s ability to issue executive orders without the consent of the legislature has gone a long way towards a return to reality.
The more I see of Fauci, the more repellent he gets.
Then there was the grotesque TikTok video of an “influencer,” allegedly promoting vaccination: a young person of XY chromosomes (probably) in cut off trousers, multi-colored jacket, makeup, and long fake fingernails being oh, so precious. This creature was allegedly aimed at 12 -25 year-olds, so apparently the Administration is following the Pee-Wee Herman school of youth engagement.
These are not serious people.
And so many people wanted to think it a joke.
Wolverine’s gay clown cousin. Anyone influenced by that is far too dumb to have a useful opinion.
Wolverine says that the clown is no Kin Of His.
Are you going to argue with Wolverine? 😈
I wanted a) a quart of brain bleach, and b) several minutes of my life back.
At this point, I think they are just too invested in their motivations to use the beer flu and vax to further their agendas. Yeah, down with Falsie, but TPTB don’t want any of us to believe Covid-19 is a flu acting out and mutating like others. They want us to believe it’s death at our doors.
A very interesting column. Thank you.
We’re heading into “not enough sunlight to make Vitamin D” season, not “cold and flu season.” As Dr. Dan Stark said in his excellent speech before the Mt. Vernon School Board (which keeps getting taken down), the virus waits until people are immune compromised. And that happens when there isn’t enough sunlight.
If only more medical professionals understood this and would recommend Vitamin D supplements. They’re cheap and effective, a little bit of sunshine in each pill. Like magic.
Dick ‘Turpin’ Durban is trying to eliminate this possibility. It’s in the latest senate Charlie Foxtrot.
What did they put in this time? They making vitamin S supplements prescription only or some such?
There are people on this planet paler than I am, but they’re called albinos (or live in ireland). Given that fact, I have supplemented with D for years because the alternatives are melanoma or being constantly ill. I buy it from Costco, a 6 month supply for about $10, and I’m good to go.
I’ve said since at least March/April last year that lockdowns and “essential workers only” so called mitigation efforts would make everything worse, as people who were anxious and shut up away from the sun destroyed their immune systems. I’d laud myself as a soothsayer, except it’s common fecking sense.
I think they changed the guidelines but I remember the early UK guidance in ~April 2020 saying that people should get out and exercise on their own each day.
Absolutely! Vitamin D, at least 2000 i.u., Zinc, and vitamin C will drastically improve your chances…
Viruses are viral… Like those videos that go everywhere… And a fittycent Chinese paper face diaper is of no more value than any other animistic fetish…
When I was in Japan in the early 90s, if a Japanese person thought he was sick, he would wear a mask. So mask wearing has been more prevalent there than here. However, it wasn’t the entire population. I also didn’t get sick in Japan– except for the allergies I had during the first month there. I don’t know if it has to do with the hygiene practiced there. I was in Misawa Japan on the air base there.
I’ve noticed here in my unnamed corner of North America that during flu season (remember that?), a lot of the people of Asian descent will wear masks.
Yes– I have noticed that.
When I traveled in Japan, the first thing I noticed was how CLEAN everything was. I think hygiene and cleanliness are a much bigger part of the culture there in general. The difference between Narita airport and JFK flying home was quite a culture shock!
Exactly– Always cleaning
IIRC, the Japanese also introduced strict rules about doctors and nurses washing their hands between patients. There were also measures to prevent toilets from creating a plume of droplets which would settle on surrounding surfaces another person might touch. These measures were aimed at interrupting transmission by contact — including fecal-oral.
I don’t know if the measures helped but I think the nosocomial infection rates for Japanese hospitals was much lower than places that concentrated on preventing airborne spread.
hygiene. I was always impressed with what they did to keep their spaces clean.
Many Japanese toilets now automatically (or semi-automatically once you press the flush button) shut the lid and then flush. I haven’t been to the toilet in a hospital in Japan so I don’t know if that is a hospital standard but I suspect it is
Good overview Francis. You mentioned large scale izakayas laying off folks. I wonder how the small, local, izakayas are doing, the one-two person operations where the owner’s day starts at 4 a.m. at the fish market stocking up for the evening’s business.
I do have the impression that travel within the country is limited, not so much by mandate as by social pressure. For example one obasan (little old lady) friend of mine hasn’t gone from Matsuyama to Osaka since a year ago last April. She normally makes a number of trips a year there to visit her son and brother among other reasons.
Yes there has been a lot of social pressure to not travel – or not travel far. I didn’t travel more than ~100 miles from my home until that funeral in Tohoku.
That’s one of the things that is fraying. Yesterday I saw lots of cars with number plates from other non-local prefectures (Kyoto, Osaka, Kanagawa…) and in fact that is something that has gradually increased. Last year we didn’t see any, gradually this year people have started driving more
It’s amazing how quickly heavy traffic moves back to being a nuisance from being a sign of hope.
I should add. The local mom&pop izakayas tend to have regulars that patronize them indivudually or in small groups (couples, threes fours) for reasons other than business boozing. As a result they are doing OK, in fact one that we like in Masuda says they are doing better because their regulars have been coming in more frequently because they want to go out in the evening and they can’t go business boozing. A standing bar that we know in Hamada changed its hours (which led us to think it’d gone bust until we wandered back past it later and found it open) but in fact it’s doing fine. Just not opening at 5pm because no one goes there from the office like they used to.
I’m sure it varies by area. I suspect that the tiny holes in the wall near the major stations in Tokyo are struggling just as much as the larger places in the same areas. When we went to Tohoku we ate one night at a fairly large izakaya that had been able to split each table (for max 6 people) into a separate roomette. They seemed to be doing reasonable business.
Talking of Tokyo, there are a couple of places that I really hope are still in business when (in a month or so) I expect to visit when I have my first business trip in 18 months. We shall see. If Sarah permits I’ll report more later
Thanks that’s what I kind of hoped and expected. Talking to friends I’ve the impression the live (music) bars are struggling but still hanging in as well.
I wonder what the story is on vaccine deaths and other side effects in Japan…
The article was both informative and insightful.
Thank you for giving us a perspective from someplace outside our own insane borders.
a) It sounds like Japanese domestic politics did not have a faction that stood to profit by screwing up policy, and taking advantage of the emergency?
b) Respiratory viral load out, and viral symptoms seem to be linked, sharing a common mechanism in viral replications. So, for a respiratory virus, we would expect asymptomatic transmission to be rarely if ever found with lethal symptoms. Forex, a strain of rhinovirus that may entirely harmless, but have infectious transmission that is basically without symptom because there is never really any noticeable symptoms. Or, a virus that kills everyone, but spread is pretty obvious because symptoms coincide with output viral load.
c) Any evidence of the theory that Covid is a Japanese/American bioweapons project or program?
I’ve see a lot of information, if not evidence suggesting it came out of Chinese, American funded, bio-weapons lab.
Yeah, but the PRC was saying that it was a collaboration between Japan and America. If that claim is untrue, it raises questions about the other claims made by the PRC.
If China says the sky is overhead, look up and make sure.
All claims by the PRC are bullshit.
The communist Chinese tell us what they want us to hear. Truth, facts, consistency and reality itself are irrelevant. The Party line is supreme.
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I used to live on a farm. I know what bullshit smells like.
Kinda like the US…
However, in the U.S. we’re (mostly) not prevented at the barrel of a gun from saying, “Oh yeah? Prove it.”
How did Fauxi predict that there would be “a surprise pandemic during Trump’s term in office” in February 2017?
Deliberately causing it would be one way. And being enough of a malignant narcissist to show off by ‘predicting’ it in advance.
The Lying Lawn Gnome has much to answer for.
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Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
Related to c) one thing I have noticed is Japan as a whole and Japanese people individually are looking at finding alternatives to the PRC as a source of stuff. Whether that’s make it domestically, buy from Vietnam, India etc. or switch to a different product that doesn’t come from China
A friend told me, if I remember right, Japan’s pushing for 90% electric vehicles by 2030. Unless things change I suspect the batteries needed will make them rater dependant upon PRC.
a) I heard that there was a big hydrogen push by one of the Japanese car companies, seems to have gotten scrapped with holding the olympics in 2020.
b) The smart move would probably be to abandon the push for electric.
Toyota wants to do Hydrogen cars. Partly because it’s done the sums and notes that the electricity requirement to charge millions of electric cars is lacking and will remain lacking for the foreseeable future
Toyota’s take on electric vehicles (from Peter Grant’s blog):
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2021/08/so-much-for-electric-vehicles.html
I lived there for nearly 8 years until 2015, and we were there during China’s MASSIVE anti-foreign (in general) / anti-Japanese (specifically) riots where they spent several days smashing every Japanese thing they could get their hands on. It was nerve-wracking, and as a result Japan has been trying ever since to lessen their reliance on cheap Chinese crap. If there’s one positive thing about the wuhanic plague, it’s that it has increased the exodus away from Chinese manufacturing.
Also, good article. Occasionally we get a little news from my in-laws (they live in Gunma) but they’re kind of shut-ins so it’s difficult to get a real good idea of what it’s actually like there. I shudder to think of having to wear a mask to teach from June through September as the weather is just awful.
c4c
It is interesting that Japanese conformance seems to consist at least partly of merely reporting they’re conforming.
0:)
That is Japan. When a Japanese person says “yes” you may think that means he is going to do something. It may just mean he is acknowleging what you said. Japanese are very good at slow-rolling or not doing stuff they don’t want to do while agreeing that you think this should be done
Since I don’t have anything relevant to add, but it’s kind of related, here’s a video from this year’s FanFest.
That’s the company held convention where Final Fantasy 14 news comes out, and they of course got hit pretty hard by COVID because of the … thing… where a lot of their workforce slept in internet cafes before those were shut down.
It’s live translated into English don’t mind that it starts in Japanese.
Honestly most of fanfest is worth watching, you can catch a lot of really obviously hammed up stuff, and you get the idea that they honestly like their jobs, like eachother, and wish to work hard for the best goal. And are usually having fun.
Wow. That’s… a lot of open emotion for a middle-aged Japanese guy. And his coworkers.
Glad it comes across to folks who aren’t, well, fan enough to have been watching FanFest as it aired.
One of the music videos he did with other co-workers:
(Notice Kojin Fox, the translator, dancing in said video. 😀 )
Well, usually stuff like that is for “inside the house” or “in the social circle, even if it’s all coworkers after work.” It’s remarkable for a Japanese company to tell their customers, “you are inside the house, and we are okay with showing you our true emotions, instead of our social face.”
Of course, this is why fandom is important to nerds — because we do feel like “inside the house” includes people we haven’t met, because “the house” is our interests.
Final Fantasy XIV has had an interesting life. The current lead for the game basically saved it from catastrophic failure when he was brought onboard, and he’s made sure to not shut the fans out ever since. If it wasn’t for fans who trusted he could salvage the game (when even he admitted it might not happen), then the game would not have survived to become one of the most popular MMORPGs on the market. So he makes sure to stay good with the fans.
He’s probably also got a lot of leeway within SE because he managed to turn around the utter disaster that was meant to be one of the company’s flagship products. So if he and his team are eccentric by Japanese standards, the board just shrugs and rolls with it. What he does works.
Let’s just say, “You can’t hide from the virus, forever.”
You can get away from it for a little while by initiating true quarantines. However, masking? Not unless you’re wearing military grade NBC masks. And even then there are ways for the virus to sneak through.
Let me show you why masks don’t work for airborne viruses. Put your mask on, then go stand next to someone smoking. You can still smell the smoke, can’t you? That’s because the smoke particles go right through the mask. Now the virus particles of COVID are even smaller than the smoke particles. Guess what? They go right through the mask.
Masks will stop particles of aerosolized contaminated saliva (i.e. small droplets that hang in the air) from breathing, coughing, or talking. But if you touch your mask, you’ve just contaminated yourself. Furthermore, those same particles get on your clothing and are picked up by you each time you touch your clothing. Again, you’ve contaminated yourself. And as soon as you rub your eyes, nose, or mouth, you’ve just potentially infected yourself.
So you wear a mask. Well, you need to wear a brand new, or washed and sterilized, uncontaminated mask every few hours when exposed to other people, and new or washed and sterilized clothing too, or everything you’ve done won’t stop the secondary contamination. The more exposure to viral laden people, the more gets stuck on and in your mask and clothing, and the more that slips through anyway. Wearing A mask isn;t going to cut it.
Furthermore, those masks themselves become breeding grounds for molds and bacteria if not frequently washed and sterilized or replaced. So you may escape COVID, only to cause yourself to catch pneumonia or other respiratory ailments from some bacteria or other sources.
I figured that out when I was standing outside in blow freezing weather with the mask on and the breath plumes were visible.
I even demonstrated this to my Magic Power of Cotton coworkers.
Made no difference.
I am at a loss.
The ER nurse from SoCal who blogs* at raconteurreport dot blogspot com has (repeatedly) made the point that the non-medical masks are to keep your own droplets containing your personal blend of pathogens from passing out to the outside world.. So, as noted above, if you’re sick, wear a mask so you don’t share the wealth. Otherwise, if you want a mask to avoid getting the ChiCom virus, you need to follow the full medical protocol. Fully.
FWIW, he’s done the latter, and has not contracted the virus. IMHO, that’s impressive for an ER nurse. He’s going to be one of those with a rather unpleasant reaction if Gabbin’ Noisome goes through with the mandate. Las Vegas and Phoenix need nurses, and he’s willing to do the weekly commute. Beyond that, I don’t know what he’ll do**.
(*) If you don’t know the blog, it’s pretty profane. He’s a Marine.
(**) He’s also just about ready to flip the switch from “everything’s cool” to “let’s start the dance”.
Attempting an unrelated cute:
https://www.redditmedia.com/r/Animemes/comments/p2jese/surprisingly_addictive
Nope.
Note:
it’s Reddit. You probably don’t want to go there, unless someone says a specific post is good, and even then don’t read the comments.
Reddit had a great sub called No New Normal that took on and made fun of all this hysterical crap but I think it just got banned.
Most exellent post. Thank you very much Mr. Turner
Vote time:
https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/226890-what-theme-shall-we-read-in-september
Th is column is so interesting. We watch a fair amount of NHK Japan, and in addition to the US media’s Olympics coverage, it was my impression was that Japan was locked down tight. (Plus an expay fb friend in Japan who is endkessly Karen-ing about covid online)
I’m glad to be wrong. It makes me wistful to see s country where the government doesnt hate its citizens.
It is locked down tight in that it is hard to leave or enter. Though they did of course let lots of Olympics people in. I’d quite like to go back to Europe and it’s been a problem trying to work out if I’ll allowed back in (or what I’ll need to be allowed back in without some ridiculous 14day mandatory hotel stay)
It is possible that urban Japan is more tight than out here in the sticks. I don’t know, but from TV it seems like the streets are much busier than they used to be. The largest city I’ve been to is Hiroshima and Hiroshima certainly is a lot busier this year than this time last year.
“It is locked down tight in that it is hard to leave or enter. ”
[eyes nonexistent southern U.S. border]
I’d be all for THAT kind of lockdown…
Islands make that a lot easier
c4c
As someone living in Yamaguchi, the prefecture next to Shimane, this is exactly on point. Mirrors exactly my experience and thoughts.
Izumo (a city in Shimane), is a sister city with Santa Clara. We know someone who came from Izumo, in a cultural exchange.
An interesting view of Japan. How far from Izumo are you?
That’s where I am. 2-3 miles from Izumo Taisha
Thanks for the update. Also, Japanese have ‘routinely’ masked for years due to their phobias about hygiene and the lack of personal space, especially on the trains. Most of my time there was either in Misawa, Sendai, Tokyo, Yokosuka, Kure, and Sasebo.