About Japan being one of the most militaristic countries in the world, I don't think that "militaristic" represents any kind of deep human feature, but the superficial product of other deeper features. Japanese people are not "otakuistic", but they collectively have some characteristics that manifest in being otaku. At least some of them.
Modern military forces rely on discipline. Drill and drill and more drill. Trust your comrades, trust your superiors.
I don't think Japanese people were ever "militaristic", they were simply disciplined and trustworthy. Were the Japanese people too trusting in their military elite, a very aggressive elite to be sure, that lead them into an expansionist war? Sure. But that is different from saying that Japanese people were militaristic and are now pacifistic.
East Asians in general just strike me as having lots of discipline, but often being bad (sometimes very bad) at applying it correctely.
Sometimes you've got to "work smarter not harder", a thing that many individuals around the world struggle with and on the whole East Asians seem to struggle with. There is a certain kind of laziness and ill-discipline that motivates one to find an easier way (without cutting corners).
What's striking about the Pacific War is that even the Japanese leaders that launched it thought they were very likely to lose when they made the decision. At least the Germans THOUGHT they would win. How many people start total wars they *expect* to lose?
What it came down to is that nobody wanted to lose face or have an uncomfortable acknowledgment about China was a boondoggle. The leadership didn't want to escalate those disagreements with each other, so they escalated against the entire world. They decided to work harder, not smarter.
They are lucky to be our protectorate now so that they can't get themselves in trouble, but I hope they retain some of the unique virtues of their society rather then just merge with us (making the entire OECD prone to a single failure mode if they are all the same).
I wouldn’t say that Germany expected to win WW2 before launching it. Take a look at Tooze’s recent book on the Nazi war economy -- highly recommended. He characterizes the German leadership as being widely convinced that the war was almost hopeless against the Western Allies, even without Soviet interference.
The initial war plan the Wehrmacht favored (this was in ‘37 or ‘38 IIRC) called for an almost-hopeless defensive posture to a possible against the West, with the vague hope that, although the the West’s victory was inevitable given enough time, they would get tired of the killing and agree to peace before that point.
Tooze also argued that Hitler privately believed the war was a desperate gambit and was very unsure if he would win, but he thought it was Germany’s last chance for greatness. He called for a much more aggressive approach to France, despite having doubts himself, because that was the only hope of victory.
The suddenness and ease of France’s collapse was a surprise to almost everyone on both sides. Perhaps the equivalent, in reverse, of Ukraine’s non-collapse in 2022.
I’ve read tooze, and you should know from his work that Japan was second rate compared to Germany. There is a reason we did Germany first even though Japan attacked us.
Germany was never favored to win the war, but it wasn’t literally impossible. I can come up with some points of divergence and make it work. Just because I wouldn’t bet on any of them doesn’t make the probability 0%.
(Win here meaning achieve some sort of Cold War situation with the west we’re they secure Europe).
Hitler had some idea of how hard it might be but also wasn’t the brightest or most objective person.
By contrast, there is no possible way for Japan to win the war. None. Japans situation is even worse than is commonly understood, and your common man knows they had no chance.
You can imagine Germany taking Moscow and the Soviet effort collapsing, however improbable. You can imagine a smarter approach to strangling Britain. I could give Japan a dozen reverse midways and I can’t imagine it mattering at all.
Funny enough, we can probably draw a parallel to Japan's strategy for the war with that initial Wehrmacht plan of going to war with a defensive orientation towards the West, out of hopes of a stalemate and a favorable settlement. And yeah, it seems like a basically bonkers approach to offensive war -- to anticipate that an enemy with greater resources will respond to some temporary setbacks by letting you keep your conquests. What's your counterplay if they say "no"? Seppuku, it turns out.
It seems like a very basic failure of psychology. The strategy of pursuing stalemate and hoping to sue for peace is the typical strategy of a defensive war, and sometimes it works there. It's the strategy Ukraine is pursuing right now. But it turns out it makes a world of difference for a more powerful nation's willingness to keep fighting in the face of setbacks if it is responding to aggression or if it is itself the aggressor.
As an avid (Scandinavian) fan & explorer of grocery stores, I'm quite curious about what caused the negative impression of Scandinavian supermarkets. (Is it the alcohol thing?) I've always viewed Swedish supermarkets as places of splendor and hedonistic indulgence, but maybe that's because I live in Norway?
1) I was in Japan a long time ago, but my general impression is that they held foreigners to a lower standard of behavior. "Of course those degenerate foreigners wouldn't mask." Combine this with a non-confrontational attitude and a feeling that tourists are not some kind of permanent problem and basically they just let it go and keep their disapproval internal.
This isn't a problem if you're a visitor but can be more of a problem if you tried to live and work in Japan, especially if you weren't a special person in any way. One reason there is such a low % of people who move permanently to Japan is they figure this out. That internal disapproval will later come out in lots of passive aggressive ways.
2) I'm not sure what the difference between "trust" and "trust-worthiness" is supposed to be.
3) I don't see what "trustworthiness" has to do with Pearl Harbor.
Obviously, Japanese are trustworthy to "insiders". The people in the attack fleet could all trust each other to do their duty and not send a message to Washington. They could trust each other to risk death for their comrades.
Japanese trustworthiness is a kind "state capacity". What that capacity gets used for is contextual.
4) Japan has never been averse to high skill immigration, but not many high skill people want to immigrate there because of #1. I don't think, and remain hopeful, they won't make the same mistake with low skill immigration that Sweden did.
5) I tend to think the internal dynamics of Imperial Japan made war with China inevitable, but it might not have been with the west.
As to what it might look like, aren't places like South Korea or Taiwan good examples. These were authoritarian states focused on technocratic capitalism with fake or severely curtailed democracies (in many ways Japan too, which has been dominated by the LDP in a so called "one and a half party system").
I'd agree especially with your first point. I was able to take a long visit in Japan about 15 years ago, and I had the fortune of meeting up with a female friend of a friend who was living in Japan, rather unhappily. She'd concur with everything you say there, and she felt in many ways that Japan is the classic "really fun place to visit, wouldn't want to live there."
On Point #3, I've heard it argued, I think by Spandrell, that the Japanese are very good at building tight organizations with a lot of loyalty and trust internally, which is different from building an entire SOCIETY that is high trust. It sounds like maybe you agree with this point, I'm not sure, but it seems to line up with what I see in the historical record, and even the way Japanese business continues to run today.
When you look at WW2, it's important to remember that the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army didn't even trust each other (let alone did they trust civilian population), and perhaps to a lesser degree the Kwantung Army distrusted the rest of the Army. But internally, each organization was pretty successful at achieving fanatical devotion within its own ranks.
I ran the Japan office for a global investment firm between 2014 and 2021; although the explicit barriers to skilled migration are relatively modest, the indirect barriers are very significant: good luck getting a regular bank account if you are a foreigner, getting a mobile phone contract or renting an apartment (most landlords refuse foreigners). In my experience this discourages all but the keenest migrants, typically those who already have a strong affinity with Japan.
One of the best things I saw in Japan was a New York themed pizza place in Omotesando that had themed "griminess" - complete with fake graffiti and fake wall etchings in the spotless bathroom. Japan in a nutshell.
9. Seems like the face-to-face home delivery standard existed also because the Japanese viewed it as the appropriate level of customer service and respect. Pre-pandemic, does anyone know whether any shipping company in Japan ever tried to "disrupt" this? Lobby the government or convince the public that the law should change? Or would that have resulted in massive negative PR?
Honestly, I'd love even more thoughts about Japan, if you feel like it. What did you make of the Yasukuni Shrine and its WW2 revisionism? Did you eat any of the weirder items at Saizeriya?
I really don't get the irrational hatred of masks. More extreme NPIs, like lockdowns, impose sever costs on those who don't agree with them, mask wearing is a trivial inconvenience, even though I think its unnecessary. More to the point, when you are a guest in someone else's country, huse or space, you should make an effort to conform to their expectations. I don't enjoy wearing a suit, but I wear one to a funeral, when I enter a mosque I take off my shoes, and when I visted the Wailing Wall I wore a skullcap - depsite not believing in sky fairies. Its just common courtesy. Wandering around Japan unmasked is terrible arrogance, all to avoid soooo minor an inconvenience.
I've never been able to understand people that consider masks a minor inconvenience.
They are either:
1) Crazy
2) Lying
3) Blinded by their own desire to conform/signal (kind of a subset of #1)
It would indeed not be an inconvenience to mask for like an isolated incident of short duration and infrequent occurrence. It would be like the TSA, dumb but just another one of those dumb things you have to put up with sometimes.
But the thing about masking that makes it so inconvenient is its constancy. All day, everyday. It's too uncomfortable for that level of constancy not to be a burden.
During the height of the pandemic here in the UK there was a period of perhaps 3 months where masking indoors was mandatory, and I found it no inconvenience whatsoever. I am not lying, and I have had no diagnosis of mental illness. When the pressure on hospitals receded, compliance dropped and the rules were abandoned, leaving only those who voluntarily chose to mask, and I was not one of those people. I's rather my gonads were swinging free, its far more comfortable for me, but others don't enjoy the sight of saggy balls, so I wear underwear and trousers.
I'd have a lot of sympathy for anyone refusing to wear a mask under current conditions in their own country. What I find unacceptable is more the arrogance of a guest making his/her hosts uncomfortble in their own home/country
In America, masks were mandatory everywhere for some time and most places for a very long time. By most places I mean:
1) All schools and daycares (yes, toddlers wearing masks all day for two years)
2) All government buildings (including things like community centers, libraries, etc)
3) All museums, even private ones
4) All cultural venues
5) Nearly all places of employment (offices, etc)
6) Required for anyone actually working (wait staff, etc)
7) At most public events, often even outdoor ones (the outdoor Easter egg hunt for example)
8) At some churches
9) Probably others I'm forgetting.
These restrictions were in place from March 2020 to March 2022, and I think slightly longer in California and a few other places. If you were in school/daycare or had to work in person you probably had to wear a masks at least eight hours a day every day.
That seems extreme, but my understanding is that level of restriction happened in New York and California but not in Florida or Texas. However, you probaly missed my edit of my last comment:
"I'd have a lot of sympathy for anyone refusing to wear a mask under current conditions in their own country. What I find unacceptable is more the arrogance of a guest making his/her hosts uncomfortble in their own home/country"
Travelling to another culture should require some compromises on the travellers part to conform to the hosts expectations. Or simply don't travel.
Why treat the whole country as monolithic in this sense? An analogy of someone's house where they have a specific rule does not scale up to a country where even if a very large majority wanted you to where a mask, it is not everyone.
I am in the UK and during our mandate I would have been absolutely delighted for anyone, whether a resident or a visitor to defy it despite the majority of my compatriots probably disagreeing.
Moreover the arrogance is not in the non-mask wearer, but in the mask wearer who insists that others join in their pointless superstition or worse demands the use of force to make others join in.
1) About 50% of states had Dem governors and they all did basically the same thing. Mine had a Dem governor though it wasn't NY/CA.
2) Many decisions happened at the county/school board level, so many places with a republican governor still found say their kids school enforcing masking all day. The governor of FL famously couldn't force many big school districts to stop masks (voters eventually punished those districts in 2022 elections, but it was too late to matter).
3) Many people in red areas in blue states had their local decisions overridden by state officials. For instance, my friends county voted against masks in schools and the state health board overruled them by fiat.
4) Most large institutions adopted the CDC guidance word for word, even when they didn't have too. So for instance if you worked in an office you were wearing a mask. If you worked in a chain restaurant you were wearing a mask. Etc.
"Traveling to another culture should require some compromises on the travellers part to conform to the hosts expectations. Or simply don't travel."
It should, but I'm not sure its deserved in this instance. The Japanese clearly have a mind virus that harms them and its good that Bryan is providing a counter example.
If Bryan were taking a dump on a Shinto shrine it would be a different issue.
Because, objectively, mask wearing is more harmful than religion? Its not even close in any comparison of wars, deaths and genocides caused by wearing masks.
The stupidity of the belief is irrelevant, the factors influencing the decision should be inconvenience inflicted on the compromiser vs discomfort caused on the host by non-compliance. Since the guest is there at the discretion of the host, the balance is vastly in favour of the guest bending to the will of the host.
I think you're guilty of biased reasoning on this issue, because you are so personally resitant to mask wearing.
Think back to pre-Covid times. Imagine that someone suggested that you wear a mask in public, to "prevent colds." Would you have done it? What if they offered to pay you to wear the mask? How much would they have had to pay you to wear a mask for a year?
You've missed my point, my quibble is with the rudeness of refusing to conform to a foreign society's idea of politleness when choosing to travel there. As in my examples of conforming with what I consider to be ridiculous beliefs in sky fairies when I enter a place of worship. This isn't about the validity of the belief, but the common courtesy of respecting other people, especially when you are on their turf, not yours.
btw, the covid performance of Japan vs any Western country is not an argument you should try to make.
I guess I should stop wearing a seatbelt, stop looking when a cross a road, start smoking and refuse all medicine. None of these things are 100% effective, therefore they are worthless.
I'll say one other thing. It is rude to make the Japanese uncomfortable by not conforming to their norms. Bryan probably violated other norms and didn't even know.
Japanese usually respond to norm violation, especially by foreigners, with long term passive aggression rather than immediate physical escalation with strangers. Since Bryan didn't have any long term relationship with these strangers it doesn't really matter to him, and maybe it will lower their opinion of foreigners but whatevs.
Sometimes what people are doing is so absurd they just have to deal with it if it makes them uncomfortable that someone shits on their values.
Bryan was a free-rider wrt masking tradition and local culture. He makes clear that he does not care. 15 years ago, I also did not wear masks while visiting a northern ski town but pre-Covid, it was a different social environment and most likely, a different set of expections if not for local hosts, certainly for traveling peers.
"Buffets are the sole place in Japan that enforces mask rules - plus a plastic glove requirement that I’ve seen nowhere else on Earth."
When our favorite Chinese buffet in Gainesville, Florida re-opened after the worst of the pandemic shutdowns were over, they initially required masks except when eating, and plastic gloves when getting food from the buffet.
Likewise, nearly all of the non-buffet Chinese places in town went long beyond other places in completely "re-opening" -- and were more "closed" from the start. Months after non-masked dine-in had returned at other types of restaurants, most of the Chinese places still had plastic sheeting over their doors and required you to phone in your order, then approach the door masked to slip your credit card through the plastic sheeting to a plastic-gloved worker who would then slip your card and your food back out to you.
Most of the small Chinese restaurants in my area observed the same practices you describe. They turned their dining areas into warehouses full of to go containers.
I made a bet with friends that most would never fully open again. As of January 2023 this remains true.
Even restaurants that have opened now have only a fraction of the tables they had pre-covid. I think that's because most of their meals are now delivered.
Buffet place I went to on holiday recently in Trinidad and Tobago also had the (double) glove requirement. I was like "Whoa, that's a new one. And pretty smart."
The analysis in the link appears to simply assert that masks work, with some links to other analysis making similar assertions. There certainly appear to be differences in outcomes between Japan and other countries, but of all the possible explanations it isn't clear from this evidence at least, that masks are a big part of that.
About Japan being one of the most militaristic countries in the world, I don't think that "militaristic" represents any kind of deep human feature, but the superficial product of other deeper features. Japanese people are not "otakuistic", but they collectively have some characteristics that manifest in being otaku. At least some of them.
Modern military forces rely on discipline. Drill and drill and more drill. Trust your comrades, trust your superiors.
I don't think Japanese people were ever "militaristic", they were simply disciplined and trustworthy. Were the Japanese people too trusting in their military elite, a very aggressive elite to be sure, that lead them into an expansionist war? Sure. But that is different from saying that Japanese people were militaristic and are now pacifistic.
+1
East Asians in general just strike me as having lots of discipline, but often being bad (sometimes very bad) at applying it correctely.
Sometimes you've got to "work smarter not harder", a thing that many individuals around the world struggle with and on the whole East Asians seem to struggle with. There is a certain kind of laziness and ill-discipline that motivates one to find an easier way (without cutting corners).
What's striking about the Pacific War is that even the Japanese leaders that launched it thought they were very likely to lose when they made the decision. At least the Germans THOUGHT they would win. How many people start total wars they *expect* to lose?
What it came down to is that nobody wanted to lose face or have an uncomfortable acknowledgment about China was a boondoggle. The leadership didn't want to escalate those disagreements with each other, so they escalated against the entire world. They decided to work harder, not smarter.
They are lucky to be our protectorate now so that they can't get themselves in trouble, but I hope they retain some of the unique virtues of their society rather then just merge with us (making the entire OECD prone to a single failure mode if they are all the same).
I wouldn’t say that Germany expected to win WW2 before launching it. Take a look at Tooze’s recent book on the Nazi war economy -- highly recommended. He characterizes the German leadership as being widely convinced that the war was almost hopeless against the Western Allies, even without Soviet interference.
The initial war plan the Wehrmacht favored (this was in ‘37 or ‘38 IIRC) called for an almost-hopeless defensive posture to a possible against the West, with the vague hope that, although the the West’s victory was inevitable given enough time, they would get tired of the killing and agree to peace before that point.
Tooze also argued that Hitler privately believed the war was a desperate gambit and was very unsure if he would win, but he thought it was Germany’s last chance for greatness. He called for a much more aggressive approach to France, despite having doubts himself, because that was the only hope of victory.
The suddenness and ease of France’s collapse was a surprise to almost everyone on both sides. Perhaps the equivalent, in reverse, of Ukraine’s non-collapse in 2022.
I’ve read tooze, and you should know from his work that Japan was second rate compared to Germany. There is a reason we did Germany first even though Japan attacked us.
Germany was never favored to win the war, but it wasn’t literally impossible. I can come up with some points of divergence and make it work. Just because I wouldn’t bet on any of them doesn’t make the probability 0%.
(Win here meaning achieve some sort of Cold War situation with the west we’re they secure Europe).
Hitler had some idea of how hard it might be but also wasn’t the brightest or most objective person.
By contrast, there is no possible way for Japan to win the war. None. Japans situation is even worse than is commonly understood, and your common man knows they had no chance.
You can imagine Germany taking Moscow and the Soviet effort collapsing, however improbable. You can imagine a smarter approach to strangling Britain. I could give Japan a dozen reverse midways and I can’t imagine it mattering at all.
Yeah, I can generally agree with this.
Funny enough, we can probably draw a parallel to Japan's strategy for the war with that initial Wehrmacht plan of going to war with a defensive orientation towards the West, out of hopes of a stalemate and a favorable settlement. And yeah, it seems like a basically bonkers approach to offensive war -- to anticipate that an enemy with greater resources will respond to some temporary setbacks by letting you keep your conquests. What's your counterplay if they say "no"? Seppuku, it turns out.
It seems like a very basic failure of psychology. The strategy of pursuing stalemate and hoping to sue for peace is the typical strategy of a defensive war, and sometimes it works there. It's the strategy Ukraine is pursuing right now. But it turns out it makes a world of difference for a more powerful nation's willingness to keep fighting in the face of setbacks if it is responding to aggression or if it is itself the aggressor.
The supposed Japanese samurai warrior culture got absolutely curbstomped by regular old American farm boys on every island in the Pacific Ocean.
As an avid (Scandinavian) fan & explorer of grocery stores, I'm quite curious about what caused the negative impression of Scandinavian supermarkets. (Is it the alcohol thing?) I've always viewed Swedish supermarkets as places of splendor and hedonistic indulgence, but maybe that's because I live in Norway?
As a Swede that has spent last 5 years in the Silicon Valley, I was equally surprised by the statement about Scandinavian supermarkets.
Cheese and meat selection is definitely better in Sweden than here, fruit and vegetable aisles are pretty similar. What am I missing?
Perhaps the rating is strictly about purchasing power?
He mentioned something about flies on the food and a thing called "rot month" when talking about his trip to Scandinavia.
Thanks for the post.
1) I was in Japan a long time ago, but my general impression is that they held foreigners to a lower standard of behavior. "Of course those degenerate foreigners wouldn't mask." Combine this with a non-confrontational attitude and a feeling that tourists are not some kind of permanent problem and basically they just let it go and keep their disapproval internal.
This isn't a problem if you're a visitor but can be more of a problem if you tried to live and work in Japan, especially if you weren't a special person in any way. One reason there is such a low % of people who move permanently to Japan is they figure this out. That internal disapproval will later come out in lots of passive aggressive ways.
2) I'm not sure what the difference between "trust" and "trust-worthiness" is supposed to be.
3) I don't see what "trustworthiness" has to do with Pearl Harbor.
Obviously, Japanese are trustworthy to "insiders". The people in the attack fleet could all trust each other to do their duty and not send a message to Washington. They could trust each other to risk death for their comrades.
Japanese trustworthiness is a kind "state capacity". What that capacity gets used for is contextual.
4) Japan has never been averse to high skill immigration, but not many high skill people want to immigrate there because of #1. I don't think, and remain hopeful, they won't make the same mistake with low skill immigration that Sweden did.
5) I tend to think the internal dynamics of Imperial Japan made war with China inevitable, but it might not have been with the west.
As to what it might look like, aren't places like South Korea or Taiwan good examples. These were authoritarian states focused on technocratic capitalism with fake or severely curtailed democracies (in many ways Japan too, which has been dominated by the LDP in a so called "one and a half party system").
I'd agree especially with your first point. I was able to take a long visit in Japan about 15 years ago, and I had the fortune of meeting up with a female friend of a friend who was living in Japan, rather unhappily. She'd concur with everything you say there, and she felt in many ways that Japan is the classic "really fun place to visit, wouldn't want to live there."
On Point #3, I've heard it argued, I think by Spandrell, that the Japanese are very good at building tight organizations with a lot of loyalty and trust internally, which is different from building an entire SOCIETY that is high trust. It sounds like maybe you agree with this point, I'm not sure, but it seems to line up with what I see in the historical record, and even the way Japanese business continues to run today.
When you look at WW2, it's important to remember that the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army didn't even trust each other (let alone did they trust civilian population), and perhaps to a lesser degree the Kwantung Army distrusted the rest of the Army. But internally, each organization was pretty successful at achieving fanatical devotion within its own ranks.
A great case study of the kind of harmonious society that can be achieved through a strict immigration policy
I ran the Japan office for a global investment firm between 2014 and 2021; although the explicit barriers to skilled migration are relatively modest, the indirect barriers are very significant: good luck getting a regular bank account if you are a foreigner, getting a mobile phone contract or renting an apartment (most landlords refuse foreigners). In my experience this discourages all but the keenest migrants, typically those who already have a strong affinity with Japan.
One of the best things I saw in Japan was a New York themed pizza place in Omotesando that had themed "griminess" - complete with fake graffiti and fake wall etchings in the spotless bathroom. Japan in a nutshell.
9. Seems like the face-to-face home delivery standard existed also because the Japanese viewed it as the appropriate level of customer service and respect. Pre-pandemic, does anyone know whether any shipping company in Japan ever tried to "disrupt" this? Lobby the government or convince the public that the law should change? Or would that have resulted in massive negative PR?
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Amazon-leaves-packages-at-the-door-defying-Japan-s-service-culture
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/business/article/2095329/japans-frenzied-same-day-delivery-race-pushes-drivers-past-red
Honestly, I'd love even more thoughts about Japan, if you feel like it. What did you make of the Yasukuni Shrine and its WW2 revisionism? Did you eat any of the weirder items at Saizeriya?
I really don't get the irrational hatred of masks. More extreme NPIs, like lockdowns, impose sever costs on those who don't agree with them, mask wearing is a trivial inconvenience, even though I think its unnecessary. More to the point, when you are a guest in someone else's country, huse or space, you should make an effort to conform to their expectations. I don't enjoy wearing a suit, but I wear one to a funeral, when I enter a mosque I take off my shoes, and when I visted the Wailing Wall I wore a skullcap - depsite not believing in sky fairies. Its just common courtesy. Wandering around Japan unmasked is terrible arrogance, all to avoid soooo minor an inconvenience.
I've never been able to understand people that consider masks a minor inconvenience.
They are either:
1) Crazy
2) Lying
3) Blinded by their own desire to conform/signal (kind of a subset of #1)
It would indeed not be an inconvenience to mask for like an isolated incident of short duration and infrequent occurrence. It would be like the TSA, dumb but just another one of those dumb things you have to put up with sometimes.
But the thing about masking that makes it so inconvenient is its constancy. All day, everyday. It's too uncomfortable for that level of constancy not to be a burden.
During the height of the pandemic here in the UK there was a period of perhaps 3 months where masking indoors was mandatory, and I found it no inconvenience whatsoever. I am not lying, and I have had no diagnosis of mental illness. When the pressure on hospitals receded, compliance dropped and the rules were abandoned, leaving only those who voluntarily chose to mask, and I was not one of those people. I's rather my gonads were swinging free, its far more comfortable for me, but others don't enjoy the sight of saggy balls, so I wear underwear and trousers.
I'd have a lot of sympathy for anyone refusing to wear a mask under current conditions in their own country. What I find unacceptable is more the arrogance of a guest making his/her hosts uncomfortble in their own home/country
I'm not expert on the UK mask policy.
In America, masks were mandatory everywhere for some time and most places for a very long time. By most places I mean:
1) All schools and daycares (yes, toddlers wearing masks all day for two years)
2) All government buildings (including things like community centers, libraries, etc)
3) All museums, even private ones
4) All cultural venues
5) Nearly all places of employment (offices, etc)
6) Required for anyone actually working (wait staff, etc)
7) At most public events, often even outdoor ones (the outdoor Easter egg hunt for example)
8) At some churches
9) Probably others I'm forgetting.
These restrictions were in place from March 2020 to March 2022, and I think slightly longer in California and a few other places. If you were in school/daycare or had to work in person you probably had to wear a masks at least eight hours a day every day.
That seems extreme, but my understanding is that level of restriction happened in New York and California but not in Florida or Texas. However, you probaly missed my edit of my last comment:
"I'd have a lot of sympathy for anyone refusing to wear a mask under current conditions in their own country. What I find unacceptable is more the arrogance of a guest making his/her hosts uncomfortble in their own home/country"
Travelling to another culture should require some compromises on the travellers part to conform to the hosts expectations. Or simply don't travel.
Why treat the whole country as monolithic in this sense? An analogy of someone's house where they have a specific rule does not scale up to a country where even if a very large majority wanted you to where a mask, it is not everyone.
I am in the UK and during our mandate I would have been absolutely delighted for anyone, whether a resident or a visitor to defy it despite the majority of my compatriots probably disagreeing.
Moreover the arrogance is not in the non-mask wearer, but in the mask wearer who insists that others join in their pointless superstition or worse demands the use of force to make others join in.
1) About 50% of states had Dem governors and they all did basically the same thing. Mine had a Dem governor though it wasn't NY/CA.
2) Many decisions happened at the county/school board level, so many places with a republican governor still found say their kids school enforcing masking all day. The governor of FL famously couldn't force many big school districts to stop masks (voters eventually punished those districts in 2022 elections, but it was too late to matter).
3) Many people in red areas in blue states had their local decisions overridden by state officials. For instance, my friends county voted against masks in schools and the state health board overruled them by fiat.
4) Most large institutions adopted the CDC guidance word for word, even when they didn't have too. So for instance if you worked in an office you were wearing a mask. If you worked in a chain restaurant you were wearing a mask. Etc.
"Traveling to another culture should require some compromises on the travellers part to conform to the hosts expectations. Or simply don't travel."
It should, but I'm not sure its deserved in this instance. The Japanese clearly have a mind virus that harms them and its good that Bryan is providing a counter example.
If Bryan were taking a dump on a Shinto shrine it would be a different issue.
Because, objectively, mask wearing is more harmful than religion? Its not even close in any comparison of wars, deaths and genocides caused by wearing masks.
The stupidity of the belief is irrelevant, the factors influencing the decision should be inconvenience inflicted on the compromiser vs discomfort caused on the host by non-compliance. Since the guest is there at the discretion of the host, the balance is vastly in favour of the guest bending to the will of the host.
I think you're guilty of biased reasoning on this issue, because you are so personally resitant to mask wearing.
Think back to pre-Covid times. Imagine that someone suggested that you wear a mask in public, to "prevent colds." Would you have done it? What if they offered to pay you to wear the mask? How much would they have had to pay you to wear a mask for a year?
I assume with all the masks in Japan they must have 0 covid cases right?
You've missed my point, my quibble is with the rudeness of refusing to conform to a foreign society's idea of politleness when choosing to travel there. As in my examples of conforming with what I consider to be ridiculous beliefs in sky fairies when I enter a place of worship. This isn't about the validity of the belief, but the common courtesy of respecting other people, especially when you are on their turf, not yours.
btw, the covid performance of Japan vs any Western country is not an argument you should try to make.
Did masks stop covid in Japan or not?
I guess I should stop wearing a seatbelt, stop looking when a cross a road, start smoking and refuse all medicine. None of these things are 100% effective, therefore they are worthless.
I guess you should start wearing goggles. It’s not 100% but it’s easy to do.
I'll say one other thing. It is rude to make the Japanese uncomfortable by not conforming to their norms. Bryan probably violated other norms and didn't even know.
Japanese usually respond to norm violation, especially by foreigners, with long term passive aggression rather than immediate physical escalation with strangers. Since Bryan didn't have any long term relationship with these strangers it doesn't really matter to him, and maybe it will lower their opinion of foreigners but whatevs.
Sometimes what people are doing is so absurd they just have to deal with it if it makes them uncomfortable that someone shits on their values.
Meh, just remember Japan is our fief by right of conquest.
Bryan was a free-rider wrt masking tradition and local culture. He makes clear that he does not care. 15 years ago, I also did not wear masks while visiting a northern ski town but pre-Covid, it was a different social environment and most likely, a different set of expections if not for local hosts, certainly for traveling peers.
The Japanese are not peers though. They are our conquered subordinates
"Buffets are the sole place in Japan that enforces mask rules - plus a plastic glove requirement that I’ve seen nowhere else on Earth."
When our favorite Chinese buffet in Gainesville, Florida re-opened after the worst of the pandemic shutdowns were over, they initially required masks except when eating, and plastic gloves when getting food from the buffet.
Likewise, nearly all of the non-buffet Chinese places in town went long beyond other places in completely "re-opening" -- and were more "closed" from the start. Months after non-masked dine-in had returned at other types of restaurants, most of the Chinese places still had plastic sheeting over their doors and required you to phone in your order, then approach the door masked to slip your credit card through the plastic sheeting to a plastic-gloved worker who would then slip your card and your food back out to you.
Most of the small Chinese restaurants in my area observed the same practices you describe. They turned their dining areas into warehouses full of to go containers.
I made a bet with friends that most would never fully open again. As of January 2023 this remains true.
Even restaurants that have opened now have only a fraction of the tables they had pre-covid. I think that's because most of their meals are now delivered.
Buffet place I went to on holiday recently in Trinidad and Tobago also had the (double) glove requirement. I was like "Whoa, that's a new one. And pretty smart."
Thanks for these observations. But it seems your libertarian theater leads you to ignore the data.
https://pandem-ic.com/japan-and-us-are-worlds-apart-on-pandemic-mortality/
The analysis in the link appears to simply assert that masks work, with some links to other analysis making similar assertions. There certainly appear to be differences in outcomes between Japan and other countries, but of all the possible explanations it isn't clear from this evidence at least, that masks are a big part of that.
73% of Americans are obese