When the Japanese academic year started last month, students were no longer required to wear masks at school. But when 1,328 Japanese kids were asked whether they’d still keep masking from the beginning of the new school year, they inevitably gave depressing responses. 68% said they’d be wearing a mask anyway; just 5% said they wouldn’t. 27% said they’d wait and see what others were doing.
Even more depressing were the reasons for saying ‘Yes’. 35% said they did want to show their face; 20% that they were still worried about COVID-19. Only 7% said it was due to peer pressure.
A teacher at a high school in Osaka described the situation during the first month of optional masking.
We put up posters in the classrooms and hallways telling people that we’re not asking them to wear masks in the school, but only about 10% of the students have taken their masks off. Some students even wore masks during a photo shoot. Students were completely masked for all three years of junior-high school. You feel the pressure to conform, and it’s probably difficult for them to suddenly unmask. (emphasis added)
The clearest evidence of the mental toll that living in faceless society has had on Japanese children may be the increase in suicides of school pupils, which reached a record high in 2020 and surpassed it in 2022.
So how can adults get kids to start showing their faces again? A magazine called Ovo ran an article in which the mother of a nine year-old boy and six year-old girl asked how she could persuade her kids to unmask at school. The kids’ reasons for continued masking are “I’m embarrassed to have people look at my face” and “Everyone else is masking and I don’t want to stand out”. In other words, pointing to RCT data isn’t going to cut it.
The below advice comes from former school Headmaster Kazuo Takeshita. I quote it at length, firstly because I think it accurately describes how young Japanese children have experienced and been affected by Japan’s Covid craziness, and secondly because it doesn’t insist that masks have any benefit, unlike almost all other Japanese media articles about masks.
The Corona Crisis is at last calming down. But what about the state of mind of people living in the shadow it has cast on society, life, and the economy? It is a negative image of fear, anxiety, sadness, inconvenience, loneliness, injustice, dissatisfaction, anger, despair, frustration, anguish, anger, impatience, and depression. Moreover, interaction with the people around us has been restricted, and people have spent many days shut in.
The fact that the number of suicides among high school students and younger has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic is proof that it is difficult for adolescents and prepubescent children to live under the ‘new lifestyle’. Adults should be able to return to their pre-Corona lifestyles once things calm down, but prepubescent children feel troubled because they don’t have anything to return to.
To return to the pre-Corona situation, your son and daughter would have to return to the lifestyles they had when they were six and three, but at their ages, they’re unable to recall that.
Until around the age of seven, the ability to think and make judgements hasn’t been developed, so children acquire the ability to adapt to society through imitation. This isn’t a choice, but an uncritical and superficial ‘imitation’.
Between the ages of seven and 14, children begin to choose whom to imitate. It’s a time to listen to and put into practice the words of people you like, people you admire, people you respect, and people you trust, and build your character. Therefore, it is better to avoid environments filled with negative images and to intentionally increase the number of environments filled with positive images of hope, comfort, friendship, solidarity, security, freedom, joy and smiles. If you want your children to take off their masks, you should take yours off and show yourself living comfortably.
Even if you go to school to ask them to tell students to take off their masks, you will probably only hear the phrase from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT): “People shouldn’t be forced to wear or take off masks.” Parents have their own circumstances, and there may be some who have not raised their voices but wish schools would continue to enforce mask-wearing for a while longer.
It’s important to make children realise that friends can understand each others’ feelings better without masks. Try saying to your two children, “Maybe it’s better to take off your masks to let people know how you’re feeling”. It’s good if parents they get along well with just gently push them, not force them to unmask. Say that if you unmask, your head will be clearer, your feelings will be brighter, your energy will rise and you will be able to live happily.
Before the pandemic, children wore masks only when sick. For children now, a masks is the symbol of the time when sports days and cultural festivals could not be held and school trips had to be cancelled. From May 8th, the COVID-19 will be classified as a Category 5 infectious disease, so even if you are infected, you will not be legally required to stay at home or be quarantined, and headlines like ‘school trips are cancelled nationwide’ won’t be seen.
If you are irritated by children who can’t easily remove their masks, you will generate a negative image of unmasking. From now on, let’s create as positive an image as possible.
It may seem bizarre to people outside Japan that parents now need to tell their children it’s better to breathe properly and show their faces, but that’s the hole the Japanese public have dug themselves into due to their credulity and conformity.
And the problem is that even if they manage to climb out of the hole, they’ll start digging again as soon as the Government and media tell them to. And that’s most likely a case of ‘when’, not ‘if’.
Guy Gin writes regularly on his Substack page, Making (Covid) Waves in Japan, where this article first appeared. Subscribe here.
Stop Press: The Telegraph reports that Japanese people are signing up for “smiling lessons” as they get used to taking their masks off in public.
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So sad. What have they done to their children?
What have WE done to our children…
Travel, children. Travel!
Just goes to show the number and depth of the wrongs thrust onto our own throughout this covid madness! This may take decades to heal!
Japanese – turning Japanese ie compliant, obeisant, no critical thinking, sheeple, part of the herd, don’t be different, comply and diaper it up.
Only a nation of morons diapers up and believes in that bullshit. F’em.
Moderna + your government are still intent on killing and harming British children.
”Spikevax, the COVID-19 vaccine from Moderna, has today been authorised for use in children aged 6 months to 5 years.
The vaccine has been authorised in this new age group after it has been found to meet our standards of safety, quality and effectiveness, with no new safety concerns identified. This followed advice from the Commission on Human Medicines, which carefully reviewed the evidence.
This is the second COVID-19 vaccine to be authorised in this age group; the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (Comirnaty), was authorised in Great Britain for infants and children aged 6 months to 4 years on 6 December 2022.”
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-spikevax-authorised-for-use-in-infants-and-children-aged-6-months-to-5-years
The first question is, why are you giving ANY sort of treatment to children and babies, that has no long term safety trials, and that has been shown to have poor efficacy, and even that ‘efficacy’ lasts only for mere weeks?
All for a ‘disease’ (previously known as a cold) that these same children will likely never catch, will likely never know they have had….and if they did, could shake it off as easily as the aforesaid old-fashioned cold?
Absolutely criminal, on dozens of different levels….
And this announcement doesn’t mention that it’s advised primarily for kids who are at ”high risk”, which I’m pretty sure previous authorizations for older kids used to say. Here we just have a blanket authorization, as you say, for kids that glean no benefits and obviously only unjustifiable risks. As ever the buck stops with the parents. One can only hope that all kids do not have jab junkie zealots for parents.
Going by all the available evidence, plus an awful lot of common sense ( i.e kids will all have encountered Covid by now and if they haven’t died then they’ve clearly got a highly functioning immune system that doesn’t need tampered with ), any sane person can only come to the conclusion that the intention with this latest authorization is purely nefarious because it sure as hell isn’t in the child’s best interest. The biggest irony being that the fake ”emergency” has now been declared over. Clown World logic strikes again.
..yep, I had to snicker at the ‘…found to meet our standards of safety, quality and effectiveness, with no new safety concerns identified. This followed advice from the Commission on Human Medicines, which carefully reviewed the evidence.’……
….No NEW safety concerns..because they were already identified previously..and as for their standards..sorry where are they? They don’t exist, and we all know it….
And in this clown world driving test examiners are allowed to wear face nappies when conducting their examinations! If these slithering serpents are that stupid that they think the nappies have any benefit and/or don’t reduce their ability to communicate clearly then they should be sacked.
Because Gates is invested in vaccines, and funds the MHRA?
Gid help the little ones.
Any parent that permits the state to inject this serum into their children are beyond deranged and utterly deluded
To the thumbsdowner.. Can I suggest you do some research in regards to the actual risk level this virus is /was to children…
This does my head in.
A few years ago, when we discovered that Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris were paedophiles, everyone wanted to protect children from evil.
Now we insist that having sexual deviants reading stories to toddlers, destroying children’s chances of procreation and genitally mutilating them, and ruining their development to the point of suicide is complete fine, and to argue against this makes you a Nazi!?!
How did we get here?
Where is the political resistance?
I actually put a comment on the Torygraph a long while ago now, when they first decided to vax schoolchildren…it went something similar to what you are saying…
I think I said, when did parents go from protecting their children to willingly offering them up as a sacrifice for experimentation and monetary exploitation? I didn’t think it would survive the moderators, but it did, and I have to say a few people agreed. We are not alone..we are meant to feel like that, but I don’t think we are.
There has been years of lulling people into getting their kids ‘irradiated’ for bloody anything..it’s going to take time for the pendulum to swing the other way, but I think there’s enough people who know..and I have to hope that a renaissance can follow a dark age?!!!
One can only hope.
I do agree that the masses have been off guard and and an awakening is happening.
The pessimist in me says that the majority just don’t care.
Cruel as this may sound, I welcome this sort of news. I want masks and jabs to do maximum damage to reduce the chances of any of it being repeated.
100% right.