It may lack the juiciness of the U.K.’s Lockdown Files, but leaks from central Government are giving us here in Japan a glimpse of what went on behind the scenes during the last three years, and it is all rather interesting. The Pravda-like Japan Times has, for once, published an almost readable piece full of interesting snippets about the tensions that existed and power struggles that were played out during our various phases of restrictions. The key takeaway, for me, is that it is not at all clear whether any of the three Prime Ministers who were in office believed in the measures they imposed on us and in some cases were acting in bad faith. Were we just used? It looks like it.
The incumbent PM when the Diamond Princess was in dock at Yokohama in February 2020 and when the first action was taken was the late Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest serving PM who was assassinated last summer. From the leaks, it seems that his priority was to get emergency legislation through that would have allowed Japan’s U.S.-imposed constitution to be bypassed, allowing all kinds of draconian impositions. Abe’s lifetime goal was to revise the pacifist constitution, so his appetite for emergency laws and additional powers sounds alarm bells.
Abe seems to have at least considered vaccine mandates and forced closures of businesses and he worked with the opposition to bring this about – it was around this dismal time that I and another jab refusenik were talking seriously of disappearing into the countryside. But in the end Abe didn’t quite manage it, perhaps because he was mired in scandal and didn’t wield the necessary authority. Firefighting on numerous fronts he resigned, officially due to ill-health, in August 2020.
To be replaced by his Chief of Staff Yoshihide Suga. Suga, known as ‘Abe’s brain’, was a shadowy backroom figure with little charisma and zero media skills. It is fashionable to write Suga off as a complete dud, and with his permanent scowl, salaryman’s comb over and beaten-up suits he did recall one of Harry Enfield’s ‘Old Gits’, but I’ve always had a bit of sympathy for him. He was given a complete hospital pass of an appointment with Covid and the looming Covid-threatened Olympics on his plate. He made no attempt to be likeable or popular – he rather endearingly appeared to fall asleep during the closing ceremony.
I like him even more now as, from the leaks, it appears he was extremely reluctant to impose a state of emergency or to ban spectators from the Olympics and only did so when forced to by others. Whether he was a true Covid sceptic is unclear, but he certainly seemed to realise the dangers of precipitous action. He was apparently sidelined in the school closures programme and had nothing to do with ‘Abenomasks’ (a farcical distribution of low-quality face masks to every citizen) presumably because he supported neither. As PM he introduced a travel programme (‘GoTo Travel’) aimed at getting people moving around the country again. He gave a eulogy to Abe at his funeral and in his list of his predecessor’s achievements said nothing about Covid. It sounds like he did his best.
For which he got no thanks, of course. He acquired a reputation as a procrastinator and was mercilessly criticised for not acting decisively to protect the people from the deadly virus. In the event, the fan-free Olympics was actually a success, but Suga was pushed out anyway. He was blamed for a bed shortage precipitated by the surge in infections, but how real that was is an open question. As a frequent hospital attendee (non-Covid) throughout that period I saw no evidence of stretched resources, though on my last visit I did see disclaimers posted prominently on the walls informing people that they took the vaccine at their own risk. And it’s worth noting that hospital Covid support payments for a secured ICU bed (regardless of whether it is used or not) can run to 3,000 dollars.
Suga’s replacement was Fumio Kishida, a mild-mannered banker supposed to be on the Left of his party. Part of his push for the top job involved the setting up of a new agency for infectious disease management. God knows what it does. Almost as soon as he got the job he closed the border at the first whiff of Omicron so securely that even fully-jabbed nationals couldn’t get in (he had to quickly amend the rules).
He has delayed reopening Japan fully seemingly for as long as possible, conveniently beyond upper house elections. And he was apparently considering allowing restaurants and bars to refuse entry to people without face masks. The Japan Times implies that these were all popular strategic moves to “exploit criticisms against COVID-19 policy failures under Abe and Suga”. In other words, it was all just politics.
In other developments, finally on April 30th all Covid entry requirements were dropped, meaning anyone can hop on a plane and visit without either proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test. I’ve been waiting for this for so long it hardly feels like good news any more – I’m beyond that now. No one else was rejoicing either as the Japanese have been very supportive of the border restrictions and there have been grumbles about the number of foreigners milling about. In much the way the U.K. retains a fascination with the Victorian era, the Japanese still fetishise the Sakoku period of isolation (1639-1853), which forms the setting for most of NHK’s period dramas. Covid allowed a sort of return to those days which many seem to have enjoyed.
Which is not to say there is no resistance. We now have our own version of Andrew Bridgen, sort of. His name is Kazuhiro Haraguchi and he is currently a lower house MP for the opposition CDP and a former minister. He announced on Twitter that after a third dose of the vaccine he immediately fell ill and was shortly after diagnosed with a malignant lymphoma. He has gone through chemo, which cost him his hair, but is apparently recovering. The thing is, you will only have heard about this if you either know the man personally, follow him on Twitter, or subscribe to the Substack of Guy Gin (‘gaijin’ means foreigner in Japanese). This excellent blogger has also reported the death of a one-year-old boy after receiving a vaccination last week and the scandal of the 30 billion dollars the Japanese Government has spent on 882 million vial of vaccines.
May 8th might be interesting. On that day Covid will finally be downgraded to a level 5 condition, on a par with seasonal flu. That ought to mean a grand unmasking with people ripping off their face coverings and dancing gaily in the streets. However, I doubt that will happen and expect many people to keep wearing face masks forever. I suggested to a Japanese friend that only an emotional appeal from the Emperor (“the cause of face masks has taken a turn not necessarily to our advantage” etc.) could induce people to remove them. “That wouldn’t work, they’d keep them on because they’d be afraid no one else would comply,” she said. It may be hopeless.
Throughout the last three years I have pondered which of my two countries was better (or less bad) to live in in terms of the Covid conditions imposed, which country better retained its collective sanity. For much of that time it was definitely Japan: businesses stayed open, there was no heavy-handed police response or campaign of psychological intimidation from behavioural science nutcases. Yes, travel was restricted, and the wretched masks were ubiquitous, but it wasn’t too awful.
But now, on balance, I’d rather be in the U.K. The persistence of the mask madness, the partitions and hand sanitisers that will seemingly never be removed, the public announcements that will never be silenced, and the near total lack of debate or even interest in what went on is even more depressing than the U.K. Even now NHK devote part of every news bulletin to a prefecture-by-prefecture recitation of the utterly meaningless case numbers and talk earnestly (excitedly?) of ninth, 10th, whatever, new waves of infections, and the need for eternal caution. Sixth jabs will be available from May 8th.
NHK has said precisely nothing about the excess deaths (up to 113,000 last year) we are experiencing, while the Japan Times and its Government stenographers ran one piece but placed the blame firmly on the long-term effects of Covid. Neither paid attention to the explosive contribution of respected physician and academic Masanori Fukushima or reported his suit against the Japanese Government for failing to reveal Covid death statistics.
Worst of all is my dread that unlike the U.K., where I think – I hope not naïvely – that a future Government would struggle to reimpose the restrictions of the last three years; in Japan I’m not sure this is true. My guess is that the people here would be perfectly happy to do it all again.
Philip Patrick is a freelance journalist based in Tokyo.
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Here’s a claim that I’d love to be true:
100% of those who instill fear, panic and despondency have declined over the last minute.
In the meantime: Hope, Strength and Tenacity to those who think and judge for themselves!
—“we have a last chance to act.” Oh goody! Where do I sign up?
If only I had quid for every time I’ve read that or similar, I’d be rich as Croesus.
That’s not going to be your last chance for getting quid whenever someone announces a last chance to … !!!
Don’t forget how the climate data was fiddled to show warming where before there had been none:
https://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-the-us-temperature-record/
The page from the New York Times in 1989 is worth keeping in mind. No warming trend for a hundred years. Since revised to show a warming trend. I’m not sure whether it is politics or religion but it sure isn’t science to keep fiddling the data to get the result they want.
It’s cobblers! I’ve heard all this since cofo in the 70s. There’s just as much if not more life now than then, you don’t get rid of life that easily
I remember when I was a kid, occasionally I really did see men walking about the town wearing sandwich boards proclaiming that “The End Of The World Is Nigh“. Yes, I really am that old.
Thanks to the breakthroughs of science, we’ve come a very long way since then.
Now, international NGO’s, funded by unimaginably rich megalomaniacs, can make the same nutty proclamation all around the world using electronic media.
.
The rule of thumb is simply: Whenever someone presents averages of some data which is not different measurements of the same thing (NB: measurements is important here), he’s trying to pull a fast one because averaging is a mathematical algorithm supposed to remove noise, ie, randomly distributed errors, from a set of measurement of the same quantity as each individual measurement is composed of a value part and an error part whose exact values are unknown. That’s solidly undergraduate math.
In this particular case, averaging means that outliers in the original, raw data set end up being evenly distributed over it. For an example, assume there are four species A, B and C and D. A had a 0.1% increase, B a 5% increase, C a 25% decline and D a 2% increase This means the average change will be -5.6%, composed of 1/4 of 0.1 (0.025), 1/4 of 5 (1.25), 1/4 of -25 (-6.25) and 1/4 of 2 (0.5). On average, species declined by 5.6% is a gross misrepresentation of the actual data.
I keep being amazed how shoddily constructed all of this is. One would expect people with that much money and manpower could do a lot better. This leads to two hypothesises about why they cannot:
Something I should have added to the example: The individual contributions of A, B, C and D to the average are: A 0.31%, B 15.58%, C 77.88% and C 6.23%. More than 3/4 of the average come from the change of a single species.
This article is so wrong I stumped up the £5 to comment.
1) The WWF/ZSL do not claim that 69% of Vertebrates Have Declined Over Last 50 Years (whatever that means). Chris was presumably confused by the phrase: “average 69% decline in the relative abundance” in the Executive Summary of the Living Planet report. It is admittedly tricky to know exactly what this means. But the LPI website is clearer.
Here under “common misconceptions about the LPI”:
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69 per cent of species or populations are declining”
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69% populations or individual animals have been lost”
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
2) The Canadian scientists make a good point about the problems in using a geometric mean to represent overall rate of species decline. But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
They are not claiming there is no problem with biodiversity decline – only suggesting a method that is not so sensitive to extremes. They concluded that decline tends to be concentrated in a relatively few species and areas but this doesn’t mean it is not a serious problem.
“Although the global BHM model reveals considerably more nuance than a geometric mean index, analysing across systems still masked important patterns. When systems were analysed separately…., primary population clusters were strongly declining (θ1 < −0.015) with high certainty (95% credible intervals not overlapping zero) in three systems, all of which occurred in the Indo-Pacific realm (freshwater mammals, freshwater birds and terrestrial birds) ….. This suggests that this region has the highest risk of system-wide declines and should be a conservation priority. By contrast, the primary cluster was increasing with high certainty in seven systems, six of which were in temperate regions. In addition, seven additional systems had strongly declining primary population clusters but with less certainty (95% credible intervals overlapped zero), four of which were amphibian or reptile groups.”
The Finnish scientists were just pointing out that the LPI is no good for measuring abundance – but as it was never intended to do that, it is kind of irrelevant.
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
As explained in another comment: This is a bullshit metric supposed to give the impression of an strong, overall decline which doesn’t exist.
But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
That’s from a different part of the text and the quote attached to the graph is correct. Further, really taking everything into account, the outcome is
Here we show, however, that this estimate is driven by less than 3% of vertebrate populations; if these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.
[…]
16 systems contain clusters of extreme decline (comprising around 1% of populations; these
extreme declines occur disproportionately in larger animals) and 7 contain extreme
increases (around 0.4% of populations). The remaining 98.6% of populations across
all systems showed no mean global trend.
—–
That’s from the abstract. Another nice quote from the Discussion section of this paper:
Shifting the message from ubiquitous catastrophe to foci of concern,
also touches on human psychology. Continual negative and guilt-ridden
messaging can cause despair, denial and inaction. If everything is
declining everywhere, despite the expansion of conservation measures
in recent decades, it would be easy to lose hope. Our results identify
not only regions that need urgent action to ameliorate widespread
biodiversity declines, but also many systems that appear to be gener-
ally stable or improving, and thus provide a reason to hope that our
actions can make a difference.
That’s absolutely not the kind of serious problem of the WWF and it calls for targetted, perfectly traditional conservation measures, not global lifestyle changes.
It’s all irrelevant, life will do what it wants!
You can see the Board of Directors of the WWF here.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/about/leadership
There’s a lot of money in all those financial institutions so many of them work for. Is it any surprise they pursue the WEF agenda?
Incidentally, it’s only officially called the World Wildlife Fund in the US and Canada. In the rest of the world it renames itself the World Wide Fund, thus allowing it to use funds for other purposes. It’s also been accused several times of ‘greenwashing’, cosying up to big multi-nationals in exchange for donations, human rights abuses, and the use of paramilitaries.
It’s also worth noting that for very many years its patrons, directing the use of funds to protect rare species, then went off hunting those same wild species. Using donor money to keep their exclusive ‘sport’ going?
.
It is good to be sensitive and open to the damage that we do as a species but given the agendas that prevail and owe their existence to pure ruling class survival tendencies we do well to be sceptical. If you weren’t born under a Christmas tree. Don’t talk to me about environmental espoiliation when you haven’t given a monkeys about anything until now.
When I studied Physics and Biology at A-Level 35 years ago, and Physics at University thereafter, I must have missed the sections of the scientific method that told me to first determine what I wanted my research to conclude, then disregard any results that showed anything otherwise. Oh, and the step that told me to simply fabricate (adjust) supporting results if I need to. I think I’m owed a Ph. D. from someone …
Me too! And this approach would have meant getting the PhD after about 9 months or so’s study!