Prior to the upper house election, Haruo Ozaki, the head of the Tokyo Medical Association called for Covid to be stripped of its special status and downgraded to the same level as the flu in Japan’s infectious disease categories [1].
Dr Ozaki is best known outside of Japan for once calling for Ivermectin to be more widely used. But nobody important listened to him then, and nobody important seemed to listen to him this time either since Covid’s downgrading was proposed only by a couple of small opposition parties.
But two days after the upper house election, Yuji Kuroiwa, governor of Kanagawa (Japan’s second most populous prefecture), became the most consequential serving politician to call for the national government to consider downgrading Covid.
But the next day, chief cabinet secretary Hirokazu Matsuno repeated Kishida’s standard line that downgrading Covid was “unrealistic” because “even Omicron has higher severity and fatality rates that the flu.”
But the day after that, the government’s top Covid “expert” Shigeru Omi said that it may soon be time to start to consider downgrading Covid.
And Masakazu Tokura, the head of the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) asked the government to consider downgrading Covid too.
The last isn’t too surprising since the business community has been the only real opposition to Japan’s excessive Covid measures. Keidanren has also called for Japan to relax its border controls to bring it in line with the rest of the G7.
Of course, Shinzo Abe brought up the possibility of downgrading Covid two years ago, so this proposal is hardly new.
But if we assume these people are reading from the same Kabuki script, these signs suggest the government is trying to prepare the population for Covid’s downgrading after the current wave subsides, which would mean Japanese society would no longer be structured around the maddeningly pointless priority of “stopping the spread.”
And speaking of changes, the LDP’s plans to revise the constitution to recognise the self-defense forces got the thumbs up in Bloomberg (owned by the world’s 12th richest person Mike Bloomberg)…
…and the Washington Post (owned by the world’s 2nd richest person Jeff Bezos)
The WaPo’s argument is especially interesting.
Yes, that’s right: “collective security, possibly including the defense of Taiwan.” It’s nice to see the pro-revision Americans and anti-revision Japanese see things the same way: constitutional revision will enable America to drag Japan into overseas military engagements. You probably don’t need to be an international relations expert to guess that China most likely sees it that way too.
Neither Bloomberg or WaPo mentioned the LDP’s proposed lockdown-enabling emergency clause, but since they’ve never seen a Covid restriction or mandate they didn’t like, I think it’s safe to say they’d be in favour of that too.
So the Japanese and American elites seem to want Japan to start inching closer to normal. The only problem is they want it to move closer to Shinzo Abe’s vision of “normal”.
[1] For a detailed explanation of the legal basis for Japan’s Covid measures, see here. Downgrading Covid to Category 5 the same as the flu would mean governors wouldn’t be able to declare prefecture-wide states of emergency or introduce municipal-level quasi-emergency measures to request “self-restraint” from residents or businesses. It would also mean governors wouldn’t be able to formally request that Covid cases be hospitalised and not go to work to prevent the spread of infections.
However, much of Japan’s pandemic response is based on non-binding guidance, and it’s not clear how much the national government would change its guidance on masks and other nonsense after downgrading. But downgrading would probably mean an end to or at least large reduction in the hunt for close contacts, which would remove one large incentive for constant mask wearing.
Oh boy that Bloomberg article is chilling!
I remember coming to Japan because of its commitment never to mess around other people's business with its military. But now it could be on the front line if China decided to attack Taiwan. Really reconsidering my long term life here if this thing passes.
From a NATO sockpuppet country's citizen: Japan, DON'T DO IT! You have nothing to win from this but to be the US eternal attack dog in the Pacific. They gave you that constitution, now take advantage from it and remain officially neutral (I know it might be difficult with US bases everywhere though).
As the talk of relaxing restrictions increases, my experience has been that businesses, schools and private organizations here in Japan are getting more strict in the enforcement of their mitigation rules. One of my schools announced today that they are returning to online instruction tomorrow. Another wants to return to the classroom but can not figure out how to work with the reduced occupancy requirements needed to maintain social distancing.
These last couple of weeks I have seen more unmasked in and around Tokyo, but still far below 1%.