Japan's mask habit reveals how invisible air rules behavior

Considering the “Air” (Bunshun Bunko edition)

Masks and “air” (this isn’t about breathability)

I had this exchange with someone the other day.

“Why does everyone wear a mask walking around out here, when the roads are wide and it’s pretty far from the station, so there’s hardly anyone around?” “What? Obviously it’s just deference to others. It’s hedging against the risk that if someone happens to spot you without a mask, they’ll form some bad impression of you.” “Is there really anyone who’d react negatively over something like that at this point?” “Hmm, well, that depends on the air of the times.”

This kind of exchange is probably happening all over Japan these days.

Against that backdrop, the head of the Tokyo Medical Association recently proposed relaxing mask rules.

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 out there, though.”

So what exactly is this “air”?

Being Japanese myself, I know all too well that in Japan, “air” governs affairs in many settings. Conversely, when I worked in the US, I often felt that many of my colleagues “said things without reading the air” without any hesitation at all.

But what actually is this “air”?

Someone studied this over 40 years ago, in the book mentioned at the top, “Considering the ‘Air.’”

I’d like to introduce a summary of it here.

Air arises from grasping an object as if it were numinously present

To put “numinous apprehension” in plain terms: it means feeling that something not there is there, and treating it as absolute. You could also call it attributing to a material object a value beyond that of a material object. Idol worship is a clear, concrete example; lucky charms are a lighter one.

Conversely, a realist understanding that “a thing is merely a thing, existing only to fulfill its function” is what breaks the air apart.

An incident in Israel offers a simple example of “air.” A joint Jewish and Japanese excavation team uncovered a large quantity of human bones, and during the process of handling the remains, only the Japanese members fell ill. A large quantity of human bones surely evokes some tragedy — war, or massacre, or the spread of plague. So for the Japanese staff, performing a purification ritual there felt necessary. This means the Japanese staff alone shared a sense of some immaterial presence. To outsiders it would be a baffling “air,” but for them it unmistakably existed.

Enlightenment-era education in the Meiji period kept condemning the unscientific. But as the psychic-powers boom shows, the things that get denied are often the ones that stick around most stubbornly.

This kind of numinous apprehension always comes paired with “one-sided emotional projection” and “dependence.” It readily brushes aside “logic” and “technical understanding,” and entrenches itself firmly.

The danger of absolutizing matter

It’s easy to make a villain out of matter. After all, matter never talks back in its own defense.

Absolutization can be defined as clearly and definitively judging something as good or evil.

Relativization, by contrast, means comparing the degree to which each thing has strengths and the degree to which it has weaknesses, without definitively judging anything.

Absolutization invites a halt to thinking, and for human beings, a halt to thinking is very comfortable. So it gets used liberally, everywhere.

In Western societies, by contrast, absolutization is less likely to occur. You could frame “absolutization” as equivalent to “deification,” but for them, God is singular — not something anyone can casually conjure up on the spot, nor something that shifts with the tides of the age.

When Arai Hakuseki forcibly deported Christians, he voiced a particular concern. Christians held the idea that an individual connects directly with God, and reflects on themselves or receives guidance there. Hakuseki judged that this could destroy the cultural system of Japan, which is governed by “air.”

Also, when Japan surrendered, Emperor Shōwa declared, “I am not a living god” — but in fact he had never once said “I am a living god.” This too was a form of air-based domination, exploiting the fact that the other party would never comment back.

The Pacific War and domination by air

There’s a recorded postwar excuse for sending the battleship Yamato into a battle everyone knew it would lose: “It wasn’t an atmosphere where dissent could be voiced.”

There’s a phrase, “throwing cold water on something.” It’s almost always used negatively, but its original meaning is to push back against a wrongheaded air that’s building up, and state reality plainly.

Before the Pacific War, Japan had no funding and its oil supply had already been cut off. “How exactly are we supposed to win in a situation like that?” Plenty of clear-headed people must have wanted to say this, but it “wasn’t an atmosphere where it could be said.”

In the final stages of the Pacific War, the country had fallen into a game of chicken over who would be the one to say the word surrender. One record shows that the moment unconditional surrender was decided, a certain army officer’s first move was to check whether his own land and tenant farmers were safe. In other words, everyone had just been wearing a monster costume the whole time, concealing, in obedience to “air,” the perfectly ordinary feeling that their own property and family mattered far more to them than the war ever did.

The old Japanese military regarded liberals as “useless people, good for nothing at all.” That was because plain-spoken people, who say they saw what they saw and heard what they heard, didn’t fit the mutually concealing organizational norm of “the father hides it, the son hides it.”

Absolutization and media strategy

The Satsuma Rebellion is said to be the first war in Japanese history in which media strategy was used. The imperial army used newspapers to spread the story that the people of Satsuma were “senseless savages who apparently amuse themselves by slicing up corpses.”

Absolutization has weak staying power and tends to repeat itself as a series of relatively short-term battles. So rebounds occur, or people simply lose interest and the boom passes. This too is a characteristic working of “air.”

Japan is culturally prone to sharp swings of fad and decline, something people already thought back in the ’70s, precisely because it casually deploys multiple “absolutizations” at once.

When you discard some old custom and re-apprehend a new idol with numinous immediacy, you get the illusion that your very self has been transformed. When you drop an old trend and grab hold of a new one, you can feel good under the misapprehension that you’re some kind of pioneer, blazing the trail at the cutting edge of fashion.

There’s no denying this was effective for Japan’s postwar reconstruction. But it doesn’t last.

Conclusion: what it means to argue fairly

Personally, the thing I’ve felt was most important in the US, and find hardest in Japan, is arguing fairly.

I frequently see scenes where people can’t do the utterly ordinary thing (to me, at least) of having a flat, level conversation without judging the other party as “good” or “evil” based on whether they agree or disagree.

This isn’t some unrealistic demand like “kill your emotions” or “say only things with scientific backing.” It’s more a frustration: if people could just have a flat conversation that includes the emotional dimension too, why can’t they?

“I feel anxious.” “I feel uncomfortable.” “Frankly, I’m getting irritated.”

Those are important factors too. Just lay them out on the table and discuss them. Quantifying them through something like a survey, for instance, might make it possible to line up those vague emotional dimensions alongside scientific evidence and discuss them logically.

But if some “air” already exists, and people can’t unpack it openly and thoroughly instead of quietly concealing it, the air wins. Air, without question, beats most things.

Take the question from the opening: a road with good visibility, wide enough, where you’d pass only a handful of people even after walking for 20 to 30 minutes. Just run a survey asking whether people would actually feel anxious about infection there without a mask.

A scientific conclusion on this has long since been reached. The risk is extremely low (if anything, other negative factors, uncertainty included, are more worth worrying about). But scientific evidence alone stands almost no chance of beating the air. Only once the emotional dimension is laid alongside it does the “air” seem to have any chance of breaking.

Or perhaps, following a distinctly Japanese cultural framework, installing a new idol might be the more realistic solution (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.