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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
There are always unintended consequences. They never learn.
Sometimes, with progress, things do get better, for example, when I was boy, many children wore leg irons to counter the effects of polio, their legs were weak. There was one boy at school, we called him popsy, because of how he walked. He came from a football family called Rush, and popsy became the only footballer in the world to ever play well wearing leg irons. I’m not shitting you. I know you would not believe it was possible, but it was. And his brother became an Anfield legend called Ian who is to this day Liverpool’s leading goalscorer. So sometimes things occur without the side effects being worse, and one thing was polio vaccine. I’m sure the covid19 vaccine is another in the vast majority of cases.
The polio vaccine was actually a vaccine though. Well, the original one was. The new oral one that doesn’t need refrigeration – not so much. In fact that one actually causes polio. Wasn’t Bill Gates involved in that one?
https://journal-neo.org/2020/09/28/gates-vaccine-spreads-polio-across-africa/
But we can’t compare covid to polio, they are nothing like each other.
“when I was boy, many children wore leg irons to counter the effects of polio”
A few did – not many – and most of the decline in the incidence of polio had actually happened before the invention of the vaccine. As with most infectious illness, the key factor was improvements in public health.
This pattern is true of most vaccinations, useful though they may be in specific circumstances.
The situation re. SARS-CoV-2 isn’t remotely similar to these instances.
Pretty sure the destruction of the youth is intentional social engineering.
Well you can always give them more vaccines. And lovely profitable drugs.
Apart (so far) from vaccine, it seems impossible to take any measure that does not have some unintended consequencesthat turns out to be equal to or worse than the original problem. For example the dearth of flu over the last year (a supposed good effect) is likely to be offset in some future flu season when our collective loss of immunity will be revealed. I expect there will be moves to find a catchup vaccine to attempt to undo some of the loss of immunity, but I fear any such patches will only add to our debt to nature even more. In any case , I hope we will be done with lockdown in the near future, it has been an act of naive madness.
The risk/benefit analysis is at the heart of almost every prescription.
What has been different with Covid is that measures (basically of poisons, like lockdowns, masks and testing) have been prescribed with no proper risk assessment and, in many cases, in direct contradiction of previous strategic evaluations.
Unknown ‘vaccines’ have been given with no proper assessment of efficacy or risk.
We haven’t lost ‘flu it has simply been renamed – Covid 1984.
Lock up children. Hide human faces from them. Knicker their own faces. Jab them with monkey gunk. Forbid interaction with other kids. Stop school. Forbid sport. Forbid play. Blight childhood.
All worth it to make zombie cretins feel safe.
Methinks the covid period will go down in the history books as the stupidest time in human history.
If they had PCR tests for witches . . .
When our daughter was seven and being treated for cancer at the Children’s Hospital her oncologist mentioned that childhood leukaemias had increased 25% in a generation. The theory was that this was reaction to the fact that children were living in much more sterile environments, less contact with other children, less play outdoors, less dirt, less exposure to germs, and hence poorer immune systems.
Well of course. I mollycoddled my precious first born in the most ridiculous (I now see!) way. It was bleach-central in my house for about 12 months. Then when the little ming vase went to nursery I was flabbergasted to find that despite the breastfeeding forever and the general ‘healthful foods always’ mantra, she was ill all the damn time! Unlike the crazed covidians though, I realised the error of my ways and can now laugh at my madness and see it for what it was – that I was veering into mental health problems. Veering into mental health problems with absolutely no self awareness seems to be where most of society now is. And I hate to denigrate my own cohort but mums are some of the worst. Most of this stupid mask-shit and ‘we can’t see granny as you’ ll kill her’ shit is frankly child abuse.
Yes. I was delighted that a slight cold has just run round my four-year-old’s class, despite masks (adults), open windows, bubbles, distanced drop offs etc.
My daughter had a slight chesty cough and husky voice for about half a day; other children are a bit worse (perhaps because I’ve ignored as many restrictions as possible & continued seeing family throughout, so better immune system?).
It never crossed my mind not to send her into school. But for the other mums – ah, WhatsApp’s been lighting up with the opportunistic virtue signalling. The competitive shoving of tests up infant noses, the debating over appropriate testing protocol and where best to procure tests from, the days their little darlings have been kept home “just in case”. Bonkers.
The week our daughter went to nursery for the first time there were cases of hand, foot and mouth (which she caught) and impetigo in her class. She, and we, were ill for pretty much the next three months while we all caught all of the various bugs her classmates had. She seems pretty robust now healthwise.
Power of the media….needs to be repressed.
File this under ‘well dur’
New Zealand and Australia are going to suffer this problem in spades. And not just in their children either. Think of all of those strains of influenza and rhinovirus and indeed coronaviruses they are not being exposed to. And how devastating it could be for them if any one of those viruses arrives in the country if they continue cutting themselves off from the world for several more years.
And isn’t this just exactly as sunitra Gupta said!!!! Oh but government knows best!
“RSV can spread when an infected person coughs or sneezes, releasing contaminated droplets into the air. Transmission usually occurs when these droplets come into contact with (or inoculate) another person’s eyes, nose, or mouth. RSV can also live for up to 25 minutes on contaminated skin (i.e. hands) and several hours on other surfaces like countertops and doorknobs.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_syncytial_virus#Transmission)
If the NPIs did materially curtail respiratory syncytial virus transmission, are we clear why they can’t work for SARS-CoV-2?
I’m not sure of your point? I believe that covid has only “killed” three(?) babies in the UK, all of whom were already seriously ill. RSV is indistinguishable from a common cold to you or I – yet historically it’s responsible for the deaths of around 80 babies per year in the UK. They do their best to keep it out of neonatal ICU, and we as humans do our best by not kissing and cuddling our friends babies if we have symptoms of a cold.
But what else is there? Should we all isolate at home forever to save these 80+ babies? It is a shocking number but until now no one seemed to care. Perhaps we should?
I know that if were an expectant parent I’d certainly be cheesed off if the maternity unit expected to screen me for asymptomatic covid which is unlikely to be a serious threat, and yet simultaneously not be bothered if I actually had symptoms of RSV.
Worlds gone covid crazy.
“It is too early to know for certain”
Of course. But, as a hypothesis, it is in line with everything that is known about the development of the immune system.
It’s not too early, however, to know that there is absolutely no evidence to support the use of lockdowns, as opposed to the harms caused.
It is also too early to know that the vaccines have net benefit. But that seems not to matter.
Not just the development of their immune system that is damaged by the fanatics.
Perhaps someone at New Scientist can look through the archive editions back to 1979/80. I’m pretty sure there was a front cover shot around that time of a couple of cloth capped urchins poring over a puddle with a Glasgow tenement block (or similar) in the background with a caption along the lines of “Please leave me alone while I build my immune system”. Those were the days!