This article introduces Masayuki Takayama’s “Sad Immunity,” published in Shukan Shincho on July 30, 2020.
At a time when COVID-19 was causing large numbers of deaths and severe pressure on medical systems in Europe and the United States, the essay asked why Japan’s damage appeared comparatively limited.
It examined contemporary theories involving hygiene, language, removing shoes indoors, social distance, immunity, Asian dust, and Kawasaki disease.

2020-07-30
The August 6, 2020 issue of Shukan Shincho, released on July 30, carried Masayuki Takayama’s regular column, Henken Jizai.
This article introduced an essay from that column entitled “Sad Immunity.”
In the summer of 2020, the comparatively low number of COVID-19 deaths in Japan, despite its aging population and proximity to China, prompted numerous theories at home and abroad concerning the reasons.
Foreign Policy likewise examined Japan’s unusual experience in May 2020 under the headline “Japan’s Halfhearted Coronavirus Measures Are Working Anyway.”
Regarding Kawasaki disease, however, its cause remains unknown today.
Studies have investigated possible associations between long-distance atmospheric transport of dust and aerosols and Kawasaki disease outbreaks, but it has not been established that Chinese dust or Candida carried in such dust is the confirmed cause of Kawasaki disease.
The following is a faithful translation of the original text dated July 30, 2020.
Quotation
“In other countries there are simply not enough ECMO machines, and doctors, in tears, are forced to choose which patients to save—to perform triage.
The Japanese have somehow passed through without experiencing such tragedy.”
Text
The following is an essay by Masayuki Takayama entitled “Sad Immunity,” appearing at the end of today’s newly released issue of Shukan Shincho.
This essay, too, demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
It is no exaggeration to call him the world’s greatest critic of civilization.
There is an old saying, “a woman with sore eyes and a man with a cold.”
It carries a suggestion of a certain sensual charm.
But if someone is coughing with the Wuhan coronavirus, rather than feeling anything sensual, one may feel the same disgust as if one had stepped in bat droppings.
It carries the image of a filthy disease.
And now it is raging.
In the United States, five million have been infected and 150,000 have died.
Yet Japan, separated only by a narrow sea from China, where the outbreak originated, has suffered damage two orders of magnitude smaller, despite signs of a modest resurgence.
Foreign Policy, the American foreign-affairs magazine, commented almost irritably that it could not understand why.
For that matter, the Japanese government has done almost nothing that could really be called countermeasures.
Its lockdown was loose, and people continued to walk around the streets without much concern.
Nor did police beat people down with clubs as in China.
In other countries there are simply not enough ECMO machines, and doctors, in tears, are forced to choose which patients to save—to perform triage.
The Japanese have somehow passed through without experiencing such tragedy.
Foreign correspondents who habitually disparage Japan have been desperately searching for what makes us different.
The New York Times attributed Japan’s low infection rate to the Japanese obsession with cleanliness, extending even to washing with water after using the toilet.
Japanese people certainly wash their faces when they wake and wash their hands as well.
Chinese people do not even wash their faces.
There is even a wartime story of a Japanese spy hiding among Chinese laborers whose identity was exposed when he washed his face in the morning.
In Japan, the word “tearai,” or “hand-washing,” can also mean a lavatory, whereas according to the New York Times, half of Americans do not wash their hands even after using the toilet.
Jews wash their hands just as Japanese people do.
Jewish law also commands that household waste be buried in a hole.
Consequently, the essay argues, when the Black Death spread in the fourteenth century, Jewish districts did not produce patients.
Germans who could not understand the difference spread the accusation that Jews had poisoned people, leading to mass killings of Jews.
The essay argues that Germans would have committed a Holocaust even without Hitler.
There were also reports focusing on the Japanese language.
They argued that Japanese can be spoken without spraying much saliva from the mouth and that this reduced droplet transmission.
Persian, the essay says, is different.
The “Kh” in Supreme Leader Khamenei’s name is pronounced “KHA,” from the throat, almost like expelling phlegm.
American English and Chinese also contain plosive sounds, and the essay claims that infection corresponded to this difference.
Japanese people remove their shoes when entering a home.
There was also a theory that differences from countries where outdoor shoes are worn indoors could be reflected in infection rates.
Indeed, the essay argues, clusters in Japan occurred in places ranging from pubs and karaoke establishments to hospitals where outdoor footwear was permitted.
The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof acknowledged that Japan already possessed a form of social distancing.
He reported that in Japan a wife walks “three steps behind her husband,” while at home “the positions are reversed.”
He may not know it, but Japan also has the expression, “Stay three shaku behind your teacher and do not step on his shadow.”
It appeared that the world was discovering that infection-control measures adopted during the pandemic had long existed as elements of Japanese manners.
Against this came the argument that immunity, rather than cleanliness, was the key.
In recent years, enormous numbers of Chinese visitors had come to Japan on shopping sprees.
A Kyoto University research group argued that they had brought the Wuhan coronavirus into Japan early and that Japanese people had unknowingly become infected and acquired immunity.
Others argued that the matter should be viewed over a much longer time span.
After the Tokyo Olympics, a pediatric illness involving fever and circulatory and cardiac disorders began to spread among young children.
It was what came to be called Kawasaki disease.
Similar symptoms were also identified in Hawaii, and the essay states that a joint Japanese-American investigation determined that Asian dust from China was the cause.
It says the season of the dust coincided with the timing of childhood cases and that the areas where the dust fell coincided with locations where the disease appeared.
It further states that Candida fungi originating in China were found in the airborne dust.
Candida is around a thousand times larger than a virus.
In other words, the essay argues that various pathogens produced in contaminated Chinese soil had been carried through Japanese skies almost every year.
Japanese people, while living clean lives, had in fact repeatedly been exposed to pathogens from China and, by the time they became aware of them, had acquired immunity.
The essay concludes that Chinese people might even tell Japan to be grateful for it.
Because, it says, theirs is a country dirty even at heart.