Social pressure, as you seem to know, is the most powerful of all for Japanese. They will knowingly follow the crowd to their own death before they would even consider facing the idea of being a social outcast. And yes, they is a lot of straight up parroting of what the West says and does. At first, Japan seemed to not do this with Co…
Social pressure, as you seem to know, is the most powerful of all for Japanese. They will knowingly follow the crowd to their own death before they would even consider facing the idea of being a social outcast. And yes, they is a lot of straight up parroting of what the West says and does. At first, Japan seemed to not do this with Coivd. Then pressure was brought to bare and they implemented their own brand of lockdowns, which I call “lockdown Lite (TM)”.
Online speech. This I can not speak to with much knowledge. Twitter is big in the US but “LINE” is, if not the biggest, one of the biggest. While there has long been discussion on social media’s role in things here, it does not seem to be anywhere near what Twitter is in the US. I shared the restrictions one of my, now former, Med.schools placed upon its employees and students. I am supposed to keep conversation at the dinner table in my own home with my family to a minimum, maintain social distancing and am specifically prohibited from “snuggling”. The fear everyone has is being put out on the nightly news, news papers, incessant public announcements, in schools, from our employers and social groups. Not much any social media could add, really.
I know from personal experience, that any attempt to tell my employers of my qualification in respirator use is shouted over with, ‘It’s the RULE’, it’s the RULE’. As I feared at the beginning, once an action is adopted, it will continue regardless what is later learned of its effectiveness. Constant hand sanitizing, spraying and wiping surfaces before and after use continues to this day despite it being known for, what, 18 months now?, that it is not spread from surfaces.
Ah yeah, that brings me back. One of my greatest frustrations with the Japanese is their general inability to take initiative independent of group norms. If the norms make sense, it's a huge strength for them; when they don't it's a crippling weakness.
Still, one of the weird things about consensus society, particularly in a place like Japan where so much of the collective conversation takes place at a subtextual level that is completely opaque to outsiders, is that when a new consensus is reached things can transform more or less immediately and with no apparent warning.
Same seems to hold true today too. A but in the past, but supports what you said is cigarette usage. I use to use a station in Tokyo that sits on top of a river bank. Despite being open on the sides with breezes following the river, you could not see people from waist up from across the rive, the cigarette smoke was so thick. Then over night, all the smoke was gone. Japanese society decide that smoking in stations was no longer acceptable and with the snap of the fingers, it ended.
Social pressure, as you seem to know, is the most powerful of all for Japanese. They will knowingly follow the crowd to their own death before they would even consider facing the idea of being a social outcast. And yes, they is a lot of straight up parroting of what the West says and does. At first, Japan seemed to not do this with Coivd. Then pressure was brought to bare and they implemented their own brand of lockdowns, which I call “lockdown Lite (TM)”.
Online speech. This I can not speak to with much knowledge. Twitter is big in the US but “LINE” is, if not the biggest, one of the biggest. While there has long been discussion on social media’s role in things here, it does not seem to be anywhere near what Twitter is in the US. I shared the restrictions one of my, now former, Med.schools placed upon its employees and students. I am supposed to keep conversation at the dinner table in my own home with my family to a minimum, maintain social distancing and am specifically prohibited from “snuggling”. The fear everyone has is being put out on the nightly news, news papers, incessant public announcements, in schools, from our employers and social groups. Not much any social media could add, really.
I know from personal experience, that any attempt to tell my employers of my qualification in respirator use is shouted over with, ‘It’s the RULE’, it’s the RULE’. As I feared at the beginning, once an action is adopted, it will continue regardless what is later learned of its effectiveness. Constant hand sanitizing, spraying and wiping surfaces before and after use continues to this day despite it being known for, what, 18 months now?, that it is not spread from surfaces.
Ah yeah, that brings me back. One of my greatest frustrations with the Japanese is their general inability to take initiative independent of group norms. If the norms make sense, it's a huge strength for them; when they don't it's a crippling weakness.
Still, one of the weird things about consensus society, particularly in a place like Japan where so much of the collective conversation takes place at a subtextual level that is completely opaque to outsiders, is that when a new consensus is reached things can transform more or less immediately and with no apparent warning.
Same seems to hold true today too. A but in the past, but supports what you said is cigarette usage. I use to use a station in Tokyo that sits on top of a river bank. Despite being open on the sides with breezes following the river, you could not see people from waist up from across the rive, the cigarette smoke was so thick. Then over night, all the smoke was gone. Japanese society decide that smoking in stations was no longer acceptable and with the snap of the fingers, it ended.
Thank you both, have learnt a lot.