Conrad

I live in Japan but I've been following David for a while now. People in Japan generally wear masks when they have a cold. I suppose the whole country has a cold these days because everyone wears masks. Funny thing about the Japanese, though. Most people here don't believe for a minute that the masks actually protect them from coming down with the Chinese virus; they do it, instead, because they don't want to make people feel uncomfortable, promoting social harmony being the main impetus. With all that, Japan shut down the country when the panic began last March on the advice of public ministry of health and started reopening about two weeks later when it discovered that very few people were reporting themselves sick with the virus. It took Tokyo a bit longer to reopen than the rest of Japan because Tokyo is the seat of government, whereas the rest of country has common sense. One sign of hope. More and more Japanese are getting tired of wearing the mask everywhere, and have simply stopped wearing them. And it's funny, but the only outrage about people in public without masks seems to be coming from those people whose native language is English.