In an essay published in Seiron magazine, Kanji Nishio points to the possibility that Japan’s traditional hygiene habits and culture of social distance have helped restrain the spread of the Wuhan virus. At the same time, he criticizes the media’s tendency to divert attention from the essential issues of the mass acceptance of Chinese people, China’s political system, and the expansionist threat of contemporary China, replacing them with arguments about avoiding racism or global environmental destruction. This essay asks what Japan must understand as theories of Japanese exceptionalism reemerge and as the country risks being wrongly entangled in a broader misunderstanding of East Asians.

May 7, 2020

I have never seen Westerners wash their hands before meals.
They do not wash their hands even after using the toilet.
They also do not have the habit of bathing almost every night.

The following is from an essay by Kanji Nishio, which appears at the beginning of this month’s Seiron magazine, in its major feature, “Overcoming the National Crisis.”
It is essential reading not only for the Japanese people, but for people throughout the world.

China Is Moving from a Counteroffensive Toward National Isolation

I have never seen Westerners wash their hands before meals.
They do not wash their hands even after using the toilet.
They also do not have the habit of bathing almost every night.
Unlike the Japanese, who seek comfort in bathing, their bathtubs are placed in cramped spaces next to toilets.
For them, bathing is excretion.
When one thinks about it again, it is grotesque that Japan’s hotel industry has followed this bad custom as if it were a model of civilization.

Japan is not a country of the sea, but a country of mountains.
Every early spring, cedar pollen pours down upon the great cities.
Waves of people getting off trains and hurrying to their offices wear white masks.
In the 1980s and 1990s, it was Germany that repeatedly boasted in the media of its own superiority, explaining such photographs by saying that Japan was a great pollution country, that its air was so dirty that people had no choice but to wear masks, and that the industrial success of this country, which had filled its narrow archipelago with factories, was being achieved at the expense of the health and lives of its people.
At that time, Japan had already become one of the leading countries in overcoming pollution.
The results of exhaust-gas regulations soon overwhelmed European cars.
In exaggerating Japan’s weaknesses and, whenever it finds even the slightest sign of its own superiority, lining up obvious words of self-praise with relief, Germany resembles South Korea.

As of April 11, 2020, when I am writing this, the number of people infected with the Wuhan virus in Japan is 6,903, and the number of deaths is 133.
It is repeatedly being warned that Japan has crossed into dangerous territory and is approaching medical collapse.
However, the speed is slow.
Compared with the astonishing surge in Italy, Spain, and the United States since the third week of March, in Japan the implementation of city lockdowns is still pending, and there are still no prohibitions or fines.
If the gentle method of merely asking the public for self-restraint can be effective for a certain period of time, then it is worth constructing an argument that this is the result of the spread of public hygiene and a proof of one kind of political culture.

Japanese people do not dislike wearing masks even in ordinary times.
They often wash their hands.
They do not shake hands very much.
They do not touch other people’s bodies unnecessarily.
When they bow to one another, a certain distance is automatically maintained.
Combined with a gentle and modest national temperament, it is probably not so wrong to think that factors that have lowered the infection rate exist within traditional social life.

However, the spread and destructive power of epidemics are inherently enormous and exceed all predictions, so we do not know what will happen from now on.
Among the unknown viruses originating from China, one of a level that brings death within three days of infection may suddenly appear anew.
The lukewarm measures that the Japanese government has adopted until now do not guarantee future safety.
The initial mistake of accepting a massive crowd of Chinese people, about 900,000, during the Lunar New Year period from January to February 2020, and the government’s indecision in not hurrying to enact new laws for city lockdowns, including penal provisions under criminal law, may this time somehow avoid a great catastrophe, but they do not guarantee the repetition of good fortune.
It is a permissible view that the background to Prime Minister Abe’s repeated statements in the Diet that,
“Japan is somehow holding out for now,”
lies in the characteristics of Japanese society mentioned above and in its traditional sense of hygiene.
However, politics always requires fear of the unknown and preparation for the worst.
Moreover, this problem of the new virus strongly demands comparisons and reflections from each country in relation to national pride, from the viewpoints of medical standards and public hygiene, but it probably contains issues that go beyond that.
It may ignite a debate that urges a major transformation in the political consciousness of the entire world:
how to confront the economic irrationalities that have been hidden until now, the unfairness of competition between nations, the tyranny of the strong disguised as the weak, and the new totalitarianism that raises the privileges of late-developing countries as its banner.

It is said that the failures in Italy, Spain, Iran, and the United States this time lie in deficiencies in their medical insurance systems.
But together with that, or even before that, it has long been a known premise that the main cause was the mass acceptance of Chinese people.
However, there is a group of people who have motives for not wanting to say this openly.
They put forward the pretty-sounding phrase that they want to avoid racial discrimination, or, as another excuse, present the argument that technological development has reached the limit point of destroying nature on Earth and has drawn out an unknown virus, making this the greatest issue in human history.
For example, in NHK ETV’s “ETV Special: Emergency Dialogue,” broadcast on the night of April 4,
they are trying to cover up the problem of China’s political system and the expansionist threat of contemporary Chinese people.
This is also a characteristic of the Japanese media, and it is an intentional substitution of the issue.

On April 5, the number of infections in the United States exceeded 300,000.
On the 9th, it reached 450,000.
Japan’s figures created anxiety within the country as if they were rapidly following the same path, but they were still just over 3,000.
On the 9th, just over 5,000.
The number of deaths was around 100, compared with more than 4,000.
The world began quietly turning suspicious eyes toward Japan.
Various estimates and analyses based on rumors are being made.
For example, some people cite statistical figures showing that infection rates are low in areas where mass BCG vaccination was carried out, and discuss the relationship between the virus and the vaccination.
On the other hand, the unpleasant information I have recently heard from acquaintances is that discrimination against Asian residents is becoming gradually more blatant everywhere on Earth.
There are also Japanese who could no longer bear it and fled back from Europe.
Apparently, there were not a few cases in which white people shouted abuse at them as they passed by, saying:
“Corona!”

For better or worse, “the theory of Japanese uniqueness” has once again surfaced.
Since the unexpected reporting of mass deaths of their own citizens, like the aftermath of a great war, the number of wounded countries has been increasing.
Naturally, the wind is blowing harshly against China, which contains Wuhan, the birthplace of the virus.
Japan bears no responsibility whatsoever.
Yet if it steers wrongly, it stands at the threshold of a dangerous possibility in which it may unwillingly be drawn into a strange vortex of misunderstanding that East Asians are all guilty alike.
This essay will continue.