What governs Japanese society

Isaiah Ben-Dasan, Japanese name is Shichihei Yamamoto, once wrote a book called “The Study of Air”, proper English translation may be different.

From my observation, under the COVID 19 pandemic, the prevailing air among Japanese are as follows.

Let me explain more.

1) We should always follow the global standard

It’s obvious that the number of death and patients have been extremely low in Japan compared to other countries. However, we can’t either look at this fact or assess our society objectively. We should put the emergency measurement as other major countries have been doing. This is the air, that we Japanese have been aware of.

2) Information released media is always correct

I stopped watching and following the Japanese media, since the great Tohoku earthquake occurred in 2011. Around that time, the majority of the news released by media were fake. I realized that they were not thinking about Japanese people. Therefore, I have never relied on the information come from media. However, still there are considerable number of Japanese who refer the information come from TV and newspapers.

Media exaggerated the risk of COVID and have driven our anxiety and fear. However, the people relying on media have been unintentionally get so stressed with the information that they unintentionally find other people as victims to attack.

3) We should not take any risk

In early 2000, JP computer industry had been dominating in the world with its technology as well as the quality. However, they could not either change nor adopt themselves to the market demand. They got eventually delayed in terms of technology compared with their overseas competitors. This is typical phenomena in Japan. Once we ‘ve achieved that position, we tend to stick with it. Therefore, we become super conservative. We never do the thing that we have never done, as challenge always includes some risks. At the end, even though, we lose our competitive advantage, under Japanese big company system, the alert system never works. This is another format of air prevailing Japanese company.

Under the pandemic, most of authorities or other decision makers have been acting taking into account the risk. “We should/ should not do that because we would be attacked. That decision would be completely different from the air prevailing in the society, thus we should not take this action.” For instance, thorough research about COVID infection roots has been done and the authority figured out that major infection comes from the home. But they have never revealed that fact as this would be different from the air. They don’t know either how to deal with the panic or what kind measurement is effective. Most importantly, they are very much afraid of having critics from the people.

4) We are victims and granted to revenge

Under the pandemic, so-called community police have been very active. A man without face mask was on a train and sleeping. Community police appeared and put the post-it on that guy’s bag, telling “Why don’t you wear a mask, look at this unbelievable idiot!! ” Recently, that community police are looking for people who don’t wear a non-woven fabric mask but simple fabric mask. Their justice is that a fabric is not worth wearing and those who wear that fabric are ones to be attacked. We are too threatened and stressful to maintain our own compass in our mind. Therefore, its easy to follow the air prevailing in the society.

Thus, to sum up, major examples we have found in Japan under pandemic are as follows.

This may not only in Japan but also in other countries. However, even though we are in tough time, we may have to develop a critical thinking attitudes, compare with fair mind, and develop our own compass in our mind.

Further queries or doubts, please email to ytomizuka@abrilsjp.com

News Letter subscription is here