No refuge from Covidiocy, even after an earthquake
Seeing the aftermath of the 7.5-magnitude earthquake that hit the Noto Peninsular in Ishikawa Prefecture on New Year’s Day, you may sympathise with the people in the refuge centres by thinking “How awful. Three years of Japan’s Covid nonsense and now this.” But you’d be wrong to assume Covid nonsense was over. On 6th Jan, a whopping 3 cases of Covid were reported at one of the refuge centres. And it’s not just Covid. There have been cases of influenza and norovirus too. So you know what that means.
As a 78-year-old women explained to a local newspaper, “For ventilation, the doors have been kept open, so it’s cold, but everyone is enduring it. We also wear masks while sleeping.”
Wearing masks while sleeping is so stupid I’m surprised the Japanese government never officially recommended it. But its health effects are positively invigorating compared with those of keeping doors open in midwinter, especially in a refuge centre full of underfed and highly stressed elderly.
You may think that when the idea was proposed, someone would surely have pointed out the self-defeating absurdity of making people cold in order to stop them catching colds. But this behaviour actually exemplifies Japan’s zero-risk attitude to Covid perfectly.
You see, Covid is a risk, so each so-called “infection prevention measure” such as sleep-masking and ventilation from freezing cold wind is assumed to bring the risk closer to zero. Thus, the more measures, the better. So everyone endures it, as the old lady says. And if the measures lead to someone dying from hypothermia (or three years of extensive socioeconomic damage), then korona dakara sho ga nai (Because of Covid, it can’t be helped).
And with a national mentality like this, the people can’t be helped much either.
This is Japan. What DOOO you expect!?
This is a land where until very recently, evacuees were forced to leave their pets behind to fend for themselves following disasters. I defy you to watch A Tale of Mari and Three Puppies and not weep in the movie theater.
Where following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, farmers were forced to abandon their pigs, cattle and chickens when the order was given to evacuate areas declared exclusion zones around the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant, and tens of thousands of people were relocated against their will causing many more deaths and illnesses than would have occurred had they been allowed to remain in their homes.
At the same time, this is a country where the government expressly announced to the public that nobody should be forced to be vaccinated and nobody would be allowed to discriminate against those who decided not to get vaccinated in terms of employment or in any other way. I still have the official newsletter sent to every household in Kyoto that lays out everyone's rights on the matter.
I deeply regret that this general policy was not adhered to in the medical field, where frontline staff had to choose between the jab and their job. But overall we should at least be thankful that in Japan the authorities still take human rights seriously enough not to allow them to be totally trampled underfoot, as has happened in so many parts of the so-called "free world".
Anyway, following the COVID Op, I have permanently retired to Bedlam and will not be coming out to play anymore. The way the vast majority of people in Japan, and especially of gaijins of my acquaintance—who on the whole seem more responsive to fear porn propaganda than the indigenous population—fell in line with the masquerade, or even worse, embraced the cosplay enthusiastically, has left me very reticent to mix with normies, let alone try to save them from what I might consider their folly.
I just heard they had their first death due to cold in one of the emergency shelters. But at least they didn’t get infected with Covid before they froze to death.