Study shows Japan’s school Covid rules are bad for kids’ health
A good paper was recently published in Frontiers in Public Health covering similar topics to this blog.
The paper is well worth reading in full, although it would’ve been better if it’d been proofread by a native English speaker. Shobako reviews the scientific literature showing Japan’s school closures and requests to stay home in 2020 worsened children’s health due to lack of physical activity and less balanced eating habits. He also reviews the many studies that have found masks to make no difference to infection risk and studies of their various negative side effects, especially how their hinder children’s ability to read facial expressions. Important topics, but nothing you didn’t know already.
But his main contribution is his analysis of Japan’s uniquely demented “Infectious disease counter measures” for children (scare quotes his). He provides some prime examples. First up, masked and silent nagashi somen.
How would infection risk be increased by letting the kids unmask and dip their chopsticks into the water to take out some noodles? Who the hell knows.
Next is the giant dildo relay.
Next we have mokushoku (silent eating) complete with cardboard partitions. In case you were thinking, “Well, everywhere went mad back in 2020”, this photo comes from an article published in August 2022.
I should point out that partitions aren’t standard in Japanese schools, but are often pulled out for the cameras to show the public that schools take seriously their responsibility to abuse kids prevent infections.
To make mokushoko more tolerable, some schools show cartoons during lunch. Because nothing teaches kids social skills better than eating in front of the TV.
Mokushoku and partitions are also integral parts of modern Japanese school trips too.
Notice how the kids are all facing in the same direction? That’s another “Infectious disease counter measure” to prevent droplet transmission (yes, really).
For reference, here’s how school lunches used to look in 2019.
If you’re thinking that looks better for both mind and body, you’re right. Shobako reviews studies that prove it.
The importance of conversations during meals for children has been well studied in Japan. Kishida and Kamimura reported conversation positive group (group with frequent conversation) gained higher scores for good appetite, not feeling fatigue, sleeping well, and not readily catching cold (23). There are also reports of positive effects on eating habits and reducing soft drink consumption. Esaki reported frequent conversation during meals has positive relation with meal-related quality of life (QOL) (24). Previous studies also showed that Japanese children who had conversations during meals had better dietary attitudes, eating behavior and mental QOLs (25–27).
So prison-style mokushoku is even worse than it looks. But the school Covid measure that quite literally takes the cake is “simple school lunch” (SSL).
Let me guess what you’re thinking: “How the hell is a crappy lunch supposed to prevent infections?” The idea behind SSLs is to prevent contact transmission via fomites, i.e., the places, bowls, and chopsticks (I wish I were making this up). Even now, the national government recommends this idiocy in areas of high prevalence.
Unlike mokushoku which has been the norm since May 2020, SSLs have only been sparingly implemented. Shobako references a survey that found 55/205 schools providing SSLs for 10–40 days in areas under the long and pointless states of emergency in 2021. This means schools served SSLs or not depending on whether the head teacher was a credulous cretin who would probably drink a glass of his/her own piss daily if the government and media called it an “infectious disease counter measure”.
Shobako details the obvious deficiencies in SSL as a public health measure.
The relationship between nutrients and infectious disease has been well studied (34). Vitamin D (VD) is probably the most well studied nutrient which has been reported to have a protective effect against COVID-19 infection (35)…Vitamin C (VC) and omega-3 fatty acids were also considered to prevent or reduce COVID-19 infection by cytokine modulation such as IL6, TNFα, and IL1β reduction and IL10 upregulation (40)…The situation of Vitamin E, considered as a natural killer cell and a T cell activator, was similar to VC (42)…Zinc is well known for its important role for the development and maintenance of immune and other cells (44)… Simple school lunch might be leading to opportunity loss of taking these nutrients.
So why do Japanese schools voluntarily implement such depressingly ill-conceived and clearly harmful rules and why do pupils and parents put up with them? Shobako attempts to explain the underlying reasons.
[The Japanese] wear masks (112) and wash their hands (113) voluntarily because they value peer pressure and are afraid of being left out of the community.
Mask-wearing was a type of virtue-signaling in the west, but mask-wearing and other forms of ostentatious rule-following are types of conformity-signaling in Japan. Japanese society prioritises group harmony, which means non-conformity is akin to trouble-making.
Also, because the government has strict legal and constitutional limits on its actions, it has relied heavily on TV and social media influencers to generate social pressure to conform with its requests.
Television broadcasts, which repeatedly report excessively about facemasks, might also play a part in the formation of the public opinion that it is acceptable to condemn not wearing a mask…In the pandemic period, there were not a few posts on SNS by healthcare workers denigrating those who do not want to wear masks and such opinion also might have an influence. Public opinion formed by the accumulation of these factors might influence, sometimes excessively, societal pandemic measures, including in schools.
I’d add that if a school has to suspend a class or even close because students have tested positive, it’s often reported in the local news. So to avoid criticism, schools have an incentive to implement rules so they can say the infections weren’t their fault because they abused kids implemented thorough measures. You can also throw in the demands of Covidian parents too.
Of course, commitment to dumb Covid rules isn’t limited to schools but is society wide. Japan’s conformism and obsessive rule-following predated Covid, but they’ve been combined with media-driven mass (and mask) psychosis to ensure there’s been little resistance to even the most obviously meritless Covid measures like SSLs. As I wrote before in my personal favourite M(C)WiJ post, “the problem with prioritising harmoniousness is that nobody wants to rock the boat even when it’s heading in the wrong direction.” Don’t expect the boat to change course anytime soon.
I asked someone once about the masks, and he said that Japan is a mask-wearing culture. My response was: When in the history of Japan have 99.99% of the culture worn masks for a three-year period. He left the room after that.
I would like to add a few things about conformity. It is due to the lack of personal responsibility. Every person seems to pass the responsibility on to someone else or put too much trust into politicians, media, superiors. This is more dangerous than a virus. When 99.99 percent of a population cannot make their own decisions, there will be serious consequences. It has happened before; it is happening now; and I am afraid it will happen again in the future--what is left of it.
If Japan can get its people to commit war crimes on a large scale, get military doctors to perform vivisections on downed pilots (The "novel" The Sea and Poison depicts this), get its population to commit mass suicide, it can easily get them to hurt children without much thought.
Any parents with a sense of personal responsibility would immediately pull their child out of a school which forces this stupidity on children, regardless what the law says about schooling. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of education going on there. If there were, very few people would be wearing a mask or getting others to wear one.
My numbers could be off but I estimate that the total expenditure on masks for the past year has been about 468 billion (38 billion USD). I used half the population spending about 150 yen a week on masks (60,000,000 x 150 x 52). 468 billion for something that does more harm than good. Give me 4 million. That's all I'm asking. If I had that I would spend 17 hours a day pointing out this absurdity.
All that applies to med. schools too. I have several posts on what med. schools here have done/are doing. Partitions, different scheduled times to dine in the cafeteria for med students, nursing students and employees, Mokushoku. Masks, of course. Spaying disinfectant on desk tops and chairs at the start and end of classes and on hands upon entering and leaving not only the building but classrooms too. And these will the doctors and nurses serving Japan in a few years.