Sawa Kurotani explains the excessive fear of foreign epidemics in her column Behind The Paper Screen for The Daily Yomiuri:
As soon as the new-flu outbreak was reported in late April, I began to hear from family and friends in Japan who all expressed concern for my well-being and inquired how much the epidemic was affecting our lives over here in the United States. I appreciated their concerns, but had little to report. Experts appeared on national and local news and warned of the possibility of a global pandemic, and I was aware of a few confirmed cases in my area. But overall, things were pretty normal around here, and there were very few signs of the outbreak in my everyday life. People went about their daily business, and no one seemed to be running to the drugstore to grab masks and hand sanitizers off the shelves, as many did in Japan.
If my Japanese acquaintances were taken aback by this lack of alarm, I was equally surprised by the extreme caution immediately triggered in Japan. One of my colleagues arrived at Narita Airport with a group of students on the very day the outbreak was announced. She and her students went through a detailed health check, and for the first 10 days of their stay in Japan, they received phone calls daily from health officials to make sure that no one was falling ill. I heard of the passengers of an entire flight being detained at Narita while a sick passenger was cleared of new flu, and saw news footage from Japan of people wearing face masks and bottles of hand sanitizer everywhere in public places.
I know that, in our globalized world, distance does not protect us from a pandemic. Even so, it struck me that people in Japan seemed much more concerned about a flu pandemic originating in Mexico than people who live in southern California, a state that is not only closer, but also has much heavier traffic between it and the origin of the new flu.
***
While there may be some cultural differences at work, I largely attribute this to variations in the social environment of Japan and the United States. Living in a densely populated urban environment where most people rely on public transportation, residents of Japan spend, on average, much more time in crowded public places than their counterparts in the United States. Given that daily exposure to unknown pathogens is unavoidable in such a social environment, the best an individual can do to reduce the risk of illness is to observe those precautions more closely.
There are also important geohistorical factors, too. In the Japanese response to new flu and other epidemics, the idea of mizugiwa, or literally "the edge of water," as the first line of defense was key, and many of the initial measures against the flu focused on stopping it at the shore--for example, strict health inspection of incoming flights from affected areas, quarantine of individuals suspected to be infected and tracking visitors for 10 days after entry.
The critical importance of mizugiwa was also evident in the sudden loss of interest in screening for incoming pathogens once the first line of defense was breached and domestic transmission was confirmed.
Mizugiwa as the first--and the most critical--line of defense is valid only in an island nation where external influence always arrives "at the shore." The long history of sakoku (closed country) isolation further reaffirmed this worldview, when a threatening presence from outside was safely kept at a distance--as on Nagasaki's Dejima island, to which foreign contact was restricted during the sakoku days--from the main population.
Related to these geohistorical factors is the culturally important distinction between uchi (inside) and soto (outside), and the association of uchi with safety and comfort as opposed to soto with danger and dirtiness. As Japan's national boundary is clearly demarcated by water (or mizu), guarding mizugiwa equals protecting uchi, the safe haven inside, from external threats, such as incoming pathogens.
The uniqueness of this view becomes clear when we consider continental nations where outside influences come from all directions, not only by sea, but also by land and through rivers and lakes, where boundaries are permeable and connections with the outside are inevitable and even beneficial.
In Europe, these routes made possible active commerce and the exchange of knowledge. In the United States, where the great majority of the population originated from outside the continent, arriving at the shore meant finding a new home and building a better life. If a good life depends on exposure to the outside, one learns to accept certain risks involved in such contact. Until relatively recently, Japan never had to do this.
Kazuyo Katsuma, in her recent book Kaisha ni Jinsei o Azukeruna (Do not entrust your life to your company), portrays the Japanese as unaccustomed to managing "risks." She argues that most Japanese erroneously tend to equate risuku, or "risk," with kiken, or "danger." Rather, she clarifies, risk means the possibility of damage or loss, weighed against an expected return. Implicit in this definition of risk is the process of deciding whether the potential benefits outweigh any possibility of damage or loss, and an active agent (a person or a group) who makes this decision.
Through Japan's rapid modernization, risk-taking decisions in all aspects of life were nationalized and concentrated in the hands of the elite, whose primary function was to make decisions for everyone else. The reaction to new flu was consistent with this pattern.
Here in the United States, much of the risk assessment is left to the individuals, and it shows in the diverse ways in which people reacted to new flu. Each of us decided individually what the realistic chance of catching it was and chose appropriate measures to reduce the risk.
Recent Comments