Published on August 25, 2020. This essay criticizes the relationship between COVID-19 media coverage, including that of NHK, and social discrimination surrounding the pandemic. Citing an article from Shukan Shincho, it questions whether appeals by Japan’s governors and Tokyo authorities to refrain from travel and returning home encouraged excessive fear of COVID-19 and contributed to intolerance such as the phenomenon known as the “homecoming police.”

August 25, 2020
NHK’s Watch 9 reported that COVID discrimination was occurring among children.
They alone fail to realize that their own reporting is one of its causes.
Their reporting completely refrains from expressing anger toward China, while continuing to attack the Japanese government, which has responded better than any other country in the world.
Instead of directing anger toward China—the party that should be attacked, fiercely criticized, and made the target of claims for damages—they direct their dissatisfaction and anger toward the government and the members of the response task force.
In other words, the outrageous reporting of the mass media, which has never once criticized China, the party toward which anger should be directed, while continually criticizing their own countrymen, has produced COVID discrimination among children and among foolish adults capable of little more than watching television news and daytime talk shows.
People who make their living through public commentary should write a nonfiction work entitled The Mass Media That Ruined the Nation, comprehensively covering everything including the Asahi Shimbun’s fabricated reporting over the years.
If it were made into a film, there is no doubt that it would become a major hit.
It should completely expose all the errors of the postwar period—the true nature of the reporting represented by the Asahi Shimbun and NHK.
If made into a film, it would probably become the biggest hit of the postwar era.
Anyone who had felt that mass-media reporting on the Wuhan virus crisis was truly strange should find that the following article in this week’s issue of Shukan Shincho hits the nail on the head.
“A Dementia Pandemic” Is Being Caused by Excessive COVID Measures
On the 8th of this month, the National Governors’ Association held an online meeting of its emergency task force on the novel coronavirus.
At the meeting, for example, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike described this summer as a “special summer” and issued the following message: “We ask you to refrain from travel, returning to your hometowns, nighttime dining, and going out to distant places.”
And indeed, it became a “special summer.”
Even on the 16th, the final day of the Obon holiday, when highways would ordinarily have been congested with the return-home rush, there were virtually no noticeable traffic jams, while occupancy rates on Shinkansen trains were only around 5 to 15 percent.
In other words, they were almost empty.
Of course, it was not only Governor Koike.
The National Governors’ Association itself strongly appealed to the public, saying, “In order to protect our precious hometowns and lives, we ask you once again to discuss your plans for returning home during Obon with your family and friends.”
It can therefore be assumed that many Japanese people, obedient to authority, avoided traveling during the Obon period.
But was that really the right thing to do?
There appear to have been broadly two problems with the governors’ message.
The first was that it encouraged people to fear the novel coronavirus more than its actual nature warranted.
The second was that choosing not to return home did not necessarily lead to “protecting lives.”
I would like to examine each of these issues in detail, but it is clear that the former—“excessive fear”—was leading to pressure against people who did not comply with requests for voluntary restraint and to intolerant behavior.
A typical example was the case in which the following letter was thrown down in front of the home of a man who had returned from Tokyo to Aomori City to visit a family grave and for other purposes.
“Why are you coming here from Tokyo at a time like this? The governor has been saying it on television, hasn’t he! Don’t you know that? You’re old enough to know better—what are you thinking? There are small children on this street. There are elderly people too. Go back immediately! You are causing trouble for everyone. Can you guarantee that you are safe!”
Quite apart from the attitude of treating someone as though he were the virus itself merely because he had come from Tokyo, what is foolish is that the writer of the letter failed to realize that, once the question of safety is raised, the writer himself or herself cannot “guarantee being safe” either.
Nonfiction writer Satoshi Ishido makes the following observation.
“The Aomori case is probably only the tip of the iceberg, and there are likely countless examples of this kind of ‘homecoming police.’ From the standpoint of public health, refraining from returning home or going out is certainly correct. But the problem with people who become ‘homecoming police’ is that, on the basis that something is ‘correct from one point of view,’ they place themselves in a position of absolute righteousness and force it upon others. We are told to ‘refrain from returning home,’ but there may be circumstances in which someone absolutely has to go back. The ‘homecoming police,’ who punish others uniformly in the name of justice without considering individual circumstances, are a very troublesome social phenomenon.”
Unfortunately, countless examples of intolerance described as one form or another of “___ police” could be seen.
An office worker living in Tokyo said she experienced the following.
“On August 10, I was waiting at a traffic light in Tokyo and talking with a friend when a middle-aged woman standing about one meter in front of us suddenly turned around and sprayed us with a portable disinfectant spray. We were both wearing masks, but my friend had been talking about how she had gone to Okinawa and removed her mask on a beach where nobody was around, so perhaps that was why the woman sprayed us.”
Cars with license plates from other prefectures being surrounded had become an everyday occurrence, and a woman in her twenties who also lived in Tokyo described the following experience.
“When I entered a certain area of Hokkaido by taxi, people everywhere looked at me suspiciously, wondering whether I had come from Tokyo. Also, on August 6, the day Governor Koike said at a meeting, ‘Please refrain from returning home or traveling,’ I was eating at an izakaya in Kamakura when the owner and customers were saying, ‘There isn’t anyone here from Tokyo, is there?’ Later, the owner asked me, ‘Where are you from?’ and when I answered, ‘I came from Tokyo,’ the atmosphere froze and nobody would make eye contact with me.”
And this was in Kamakura City, Kanagawa Prefecture, which ought to be part of essentially the same living area as Tokyo.
To be continued.