Japan's continuing mask madness

The unmasking of the Japanese isn’t going smoothly. Although it’s been 2.5 months since the government lifted its request to wear masks indoors and 3 weeks since it officially declared an end to its 3-year-long War on Covid, some virus warriors are carrying on the campaign just like those Japanese holdouts left behind in the Philippine jungles at the end of WW2. But at least the holdouts had an excuse.

How dare you show your face!

One loyalist to the Covidian cause in Sapporo managed to get himself into the news after he loudly berated two unmasked women for talking on the subway and then hit the Emergency Button causing the train to stop.

“Everyone’s masking, so what the f*** is up with those two!?”

You may think that two people chatting while unmasked on a train hardly constitutes an emergency. But to be fair to the bloke, Japanese politicians spent much of 2020 and 2021 declaring states of emergency for similarly trivial reasons.

I’ve also been told about a mixed residential-commercial building in Tokyo where the building manager even now puts up “wanted” posters asking for information about anyone who takes the elevator while unmasked and threatens to ban them from the building and inform the police if they do so again.

Do you know this person? It is forbidden to take the elevator while unmasked.

The illusion of choice

The problem of leaving masking decisions up to individuals in highly conformist societies like Japan is that individuals make decisions based on what everyone else does. So if most people are masked, people who want to unmask will keep masking.

For example, many students told the Board of Education of Chiba Prefecture that even though they wanted to unmask, they felt they couldn’t because most students and staff are still masking. To help these kids breathe more easily, the Chiba BoE has sent out a notice saying that masks at school are “unnecessary in principle” and instructed school staff to take the lead in unmasking. But Covidian parents also understand that the Japanese are hierarchical as well as conformist, so they’re worried that if teachers unmask, then it will create an atmosphere in which kids who want to keep masking will feel it necessary to unmask.

So with all this Covidian opposition, how can Japan return to its pre-2020 situation when healthy people hardly ever wore masks? The governor of Chiba says “We have a responsibility to create an environment in which mask-wearing doesn’t continue due to peer-pressure and force of habit.”

Of course, the quickest way to create that environment would be for the government and media to break the news that masks are useless, and even if they worked, Covid isn’t that big a deal. But since that ain’t gonna happen, anti-maskers like myself who badly want Covid cosplay to end will just have to wait until the peer-pressure weakens and habits are broken. I won’t hold my breath, but at least nobody’s asking me to restrict it anymore.