Japan's Masks Persist Because Of Air, Not Hygiene
Masks and “air” (this is not about breathability)
The other day I had this exchange with someone.
“Why does everyone wear a mask walking around out here, where the streets are wide, it’s a good distance from the station, and people are sparse?” “Huh? That’s obviously just deference to others. It’s hedging against the risk that if someone spots you without a mask, they’ll form a bad impression of you.” “Is there really anyone left who’d react negatively over something like that at this point?” “Well, that depends on the ‘air’ of the world, doesn’t it?”
Exchanges like this are probably happening all over Japan these days. Amid all this, the head of the Tokyo Medical Association recently proposed relaxing mask requirements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlanHbgjBT0
When I brought this up with the same person, the reaction was:
“Ah, that took courage to say. I hope it changes the air in the world, though.”
So what is this “air”?
I’m Japanese myself, so I know this well enough: in Japan, air governs affairs in most settings. Working in America, by contrast, I often felt that many of my colleagues would casually say things “without reading the air” at all.
But what exactly is this air?
Someone studied this over 40 years ago, in the book mentioned at the top, “The Psychology of ‘Air.’” I’d like to introduce a summary of it here.
Air arises from grasping an object as if it were present
“Grasping as if present” (rinzaikanteki haaku), put simply, means “feeling that something not there is there, and treating it as absolute.” You could also call it “attributing to matter a value beyond matter itself.” A clear concrete example is idol worship; a lighter-weight version would be things like lucky charms.
The realist understanding that “an object is just an object, existing only to fulfill its function” is what destroys air.
A simple example of air comes from an incident in Israel, when a joint Jewish-Japanese excavation team uncovered a large quantity of human bones. During the process of handling the remains, only the Japanese members fell ill. A large quantity of human bones strongly evokes some kind of tragedy — war, perhaps, or massacre, or the spread of plague. For the Japanese staff, this meant a purification ritual (o-harai) had to be performed there. Only the Japanese shared a common sense of a non-material presence in this case. An “air” that made no sense to outsiders clearly existed for them.
Enlightenment-era education in the Meiji period relentlessly condemned the unscientific. But as the psychic-powers boom shows, the things that get denied are often the ones that persist most stubbornly.
This kind of grasping-as-if-present always involves “one-sided emotional projection” or “dependence.” And it easily brushes aside “logic” and “technical understanding,” entrenching itself firmly.
The danger of absolutizing matter
It’s easy to make a villain out of matter, since matter never talks back in its own defense.
Absolutization can be defined as “clearly declaring something to be good or evil.”
Relativization, by contrast, is “comparing the degree to which each thing has strengths and the degree to which it has weaknesses,” without declaring anything definitively.
Absolutization invites a halt to thinking, and for humans, a halt to thinking is very comfortable. So it gets used liberally, everywhere.
In Western societies, absolutization is less likely to occur. You could frame “absolutization” as equivalent to “deification,” but for them, God is singular, not something that just anyone can casually conjure up on the spot, or that shifts with the tides of the times.
When Arai Hakuseki forcibly deported Christians, he expressed a certain concern. They held the idea that “an individual connects directly with God, reflecting on themselves and receiving guidance there,” and he thought this could destroy the cultural system of Japan, which is governed by “air.”
Also, when Emperor Shōwa declared at the time of Japan’s defeat, “I am not a living god,” he had in fact never actually said “I am a living god.” This too was a case of air-based domination, exploiting the fact that no one would come back with a rebuttal.
The Pacific War and domination by air
There is a recorded postwar excuse for the decision to send the battleship Yamato into battle despite knowing it would lose: “It wasn’t an air in which dissent could be voiced.”
There’s a phrase, “throwing cold water” (mizu wo sasu). It’s almost always used negatively, but its original meaning was to push back against a wrongly forming air by “stating reality plainly.”
Before the Pacific War, there were no funds, and access to oil had already been cut off. “How exactly are we supposed to win in a situation like that?” Plenty of clear-thinking people must have wanted to say this, but it “wasn’t an air in which it could be said.”
In the final stages of the Pacific War, things had fallen into a game of chicken over “who would be the one to say the word surrender.” There’s a record of an army officer who, the moment unconditional surrender was decided, immediately went to check whether his own land and tenant farmers were safe. Everyone had simply been wearing a monster costume all along; the perfectly ordinary feeling that one’s own property and family mattered far more than the war itself had simply been concealed, in obedience to the “air.”
The former Japanese military regarded liberal-minded individuals as “useless, good for nothing.” Straightforward people, who said they saw what they saw and heard what they heard, did not fit the mutually concealing organizational norm of “the father hides it, the child hides it.”
Absolutization and media strategy
The Seinan War is said to be the first war in Japanese history in which media strategy was used. The government army used newspapers to spread the story that the people of Satsuma were “senseless savages who apparently amuse themselves by cutting up corpses.”
Absolutization has weak durability and tends to produce a repeating pattern of relatively short, decisive battles. As a result, rebounds occur, or people simply grow bored and the boom passes. This too is a characteristic effect of air.
Japan is culturally prone to intense swings of fashion and abandonment (people in the 70s thought so too), precisely because this “absolutization” gets applied casually, in multiples, all at once.
When you discard some old custom and re-grasp a new idol as if it were present, you get the illusion that the self has been transformed. When you discard an old fad and grab hold of a new one, you can feel good under the misapprehension that you are some kind of pioneer, blazing the trail at the cutting edge of fashion.
This was undeniably effective for Japan’s postwar recovery. But it doesn’t last.
Conclusion: what it means to argue fairly
Personally, the thing I felt was important in America, and that I feel is very difficult in Japan, above all else, is “arguing fairly.”
I frequently see people fail at the utterly ordinary task (ordinary to me, anyway) of having a flat, level conversation without judging the other side as “good” or “evil” based on whether they agree or disagree.
This isn’t some unrealistic demand like “kill your emotions” or “only say things with scientific backing.” It’s more a kind of frustration: if only people could have a flat conversation that includes emotions too, why can’t they?
“I feel anxious.” “I feel uncomfortable.” “Honestly, this is getting irritating.”
These too are important factors. They should be laid out on the table and discussed. Quantifying them through something like a survey, for instance, might make it possible to place these vague emotional aspects alongside scientific evidence and discuss them logically, side by side.
But if some “air” already exists, and people cannot properly unpack it in full view instead of concealing it, the air wins. Air, in almost every case, wins without fail.
Take the question from the beginning: on a street with good visibility, wide roads, where you’d pass only a few people even after a 20-to-30-minute walk, would you actually feel anxious about infection if you weren’t wearing a mask? Just run that as a survey.
A scientific conclusion on this has long since been reached. The risk is extremely low (if anything, other negative factors, including their uncertainty, are more worth worrying about). But scientific evidence alone stands almost no chance of beating air. Only when the emotional dimension is laid out alongside it does breaking the “air” seem possible at all.
Or perhaps, following what might be called the “Japanese way,” the more realistic solution is simply to “install a new idol” (the vaccine never managed to become that).
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/05/888/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.