Quarantine in Japan

Quarantine in Japan

The title is almost like a clickbait because people don’t really care about self-quarantines. Working from home is pretty rare compared to other countries.

Certainly there are less people walking on the streets of Osaka. Now that I think about it, the majority of decreased population is the tourists from overseas. Japanese are living the normal life. The only difference that I noticed is more people are now wearing surgical masks.

I’m not saying the virus is making no change to Japan. But I see many people casually walking streets like usual and that almost make me laugh. And there’s our culture that contributed to this phenomenon.

Every culture has its own good parts and downsides. When it comes to the culture of my own country, I think this is the thing I dislike most. That is, as long as the majority is doing it, you are ok. Whether logical or not, people tend to focus on how the society is responding. In a nutshell Japanese culture doesn’t allow us to have independent thoughts, hence it’s a tough country for a weirdo like me to live in. However the good side of this custom is that, although it is very stressful as many Japanese agree on this, there is less chaos and there’s a relieving feeling of security. Remember, although Japan may have been leading some parts of tech industries for years, the culture itself is very conservative.

I’m just picking up only one aspect and being a critic about it. There are many factors leading to this aspect.(My main theory is our trait of not wanting to stand out, and from the perspective of probability, it’s “logical“ to follow the crowd. ) So it’s a bit ludicrous to talk like if we succeed in fixing only this custom of our culture, everything is going to be ok.

Still, it’s shocking to see many people casually going out amid this breakout. I’ve seen many articles pointing out there are less COVID-19 patients in Japan than other western countries. The typical argument for this news is that Japan doesn’t test enough suspected patients. I have no knowledge about medical fields and how politics work, so I’m not saying anything about it. But I’m also saying that, in Japan, we casually wear surgical masks all year, and we rarely have physical contacts with others. Talk about culture!