With the borders finally open, foreigners arriving in Japan are noticing some things there are different. Dining out is a bargain, thanks to relatively low inflation and the weak yen. Once-familiar areas are now unrecognizable thanks to a building boom. And wearing masks is still almost ubiquitous, even outdoors.
Most Japanese still prefer to mask up, despite increased prodding from the Japanese government to let their guard down a little. For many visitors from the West, for whom masks have become a long-abandoned battleground in the culture wars, it can be slightly disorientating.
The feeling is mutual. The return of mask-reluctant tourists is triggering an internal debate on Japan’s outlier status. From day one of the COVID-19 pandemic, the country has largely followed its own disease prevention playbook — eschewing lockdowns, mass testing and vaccine mandates in favor of a low-tech, common sense approach.
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
Despite never ordering mask wearing, encouraging their use in almost all social situations was a core part of this plan. The population was familiar with masks since long before the pandemic. It was considered polite to wear one when sick, while millions more wore them during hay fever season.
During the pandemic, masks have become such an integral part of society that they have been nicknamed “face underwear” — such is the idea of being caught without one.
As foreigners return in droves, some Japanese fret that maskless tourists would help set off another surge in infections. Others say that Japan should instead use the opportunity to imitate the West’s abandoning of masks, with face-coverings alone failing to stem a record-breaking COVID-19 wave this summer.
Implicit in the criticism is a feeling that Japan is lagging the rest of the world, clinging to outmoded methods others have already dropped.
Authorities appear divided. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, keen to get people out spending, has suggested reviewing mask guidelines, and is appearing in public more frequently without one. Those around him are reported to be more cautious, worrying that the elderly population would be struck by a double whammy of COVID-19 and flu this winter.
A poll in late August found that only 20 percent of the public want to copy other countries in discarding masks entirely, but attitudes are changing nonetheless.
GMO Internet Group, a Tokyo-based tech conglomerate that was the country’s first large firm to switch to work from home after Wuhan, China, went into lockdown in January 2020, has now come full circle and abandoned rules requiring masks in the office.
“The world is moving to escape COVID,” GMO founder and chief executive officer Masatoshi Kumagai wrote on Twitter. “If we continue to work from home and wear masks, we can’t win in business.”
Should Japan look to the world for advice, or the other way around? Whatever Japan did during the pandemic, it got something right. While it might be an outlier in persisting with masks, it is a bigger anomaly when it comes to COVID-19 deaths. Fatalities are a full order of magnitude lower than in the UK or the US, despite having no lockdowns and the world’s oldest population.
Scripps Research Translational Institute director Eric Topol has described it as a “model country” from which the world can learn as winter approaches in the northern hemisphere.
The changing of the seasons is already causing some nations to reconsider their approaches. German Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach said he backs wearing masks indoors amid a surge in cases, while the Canadian province of Ontario looks set to recommend masking again.
Japan could easily find itself flip-flopping on mask advice, and the costs of getting it wrong are not theoretical. Life expectancy in the US has fallen for two years in a row due to COVID-19, only the second time in a century that this has happened, while even top performer Singapore has seen lifespans drop for the first time since records began.
That is a reversal of a trend that has been the goal of health experts and governments for decades — spending billions of dollars in campaigns against unhealthy eating, drunk driving or smoking, screenings to catch and treat disease earlier, or the dozens of other ways health professionals have sought to mitigate risks.
There are sensible changes people can make to their lifestyles that reduce risk as they search for a more permanent solution to COVID-19. Until then, masking in situations such as public transportation should remain in country’s arsenal, along with improved ventilation.
For Japan to copy the approach of countries that so spectacularly failed to contain the pandemic feels akin to repeating the tragedy of Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th-century Hungarian scientist who pioneered the idea that surgeons should wash their hands before they operated to reduce infection. He was right, although he did not yet have germ theory to support his argument, and his theories were ignored by the medical community and recognized only many years after his death, after countless women had died needlessly in childbirth.
The costs and benefits of each pandemic-era tool should be examined. For Japan, lengthy border closures have certainly been too great a cost. The country is right to welcome back tourists who, along with the public at large, should be given clear, easy-to-follow masking guidelines rather than the current confusing hodge-podge — and that should include removing them where they are no longer needed, such as outdoors.
Visitors to Japan and its residents have a little to learn from one another. With the borders open, it is time to let that information flow.
Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Japan and the Koreas. He previously led the breaking news team in North Asia, and was the Tokyo deputy bureau chief.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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