It’s now official
Masking is “Good Manners”/
While I have heard it said and seen clips of mad maskers stating such on Japanese TV, this is the first time I have seen it in print. Below we see a poster with two members of a school table tennis team displaying proper manners (マナー) for riding the train. Included, at the top right, is masking on the train, especially when coughing. Coughing through a mask only braked droplets in to aerosols, it does not in any way stop anything, diffuses it only. Such posters are not new, but this is the first I recall including masks as proper, REGULAR manners for riding the train. Like I wrote earlier, we lost the mask war.
Poster hanging across the aisle of a Commuter train serving Tokyo and areas beyond.
Note the masked passengers in the background. I took this photo yesterday, July 10th, 2024.
An off topic point I want to use this photo to make is on the Japanese economy. At the bottom right of the photo the overhead luggage rack can be seen. Above that, disappearing behind the handle strap right at the lower right corner of the poster is a silver colored rail. Long ago, this rail would have held in place various advertisements. It still does, but in the past the whole rail would have been used leaving not a centimeter of unutilized space total along the entire length of the train. Barely discernible just below where the rail intersects with the hand strap is a partially obscured white circle with an unreadable, in the photo, number. Each of these numbered spaces indicate a spot for an ad corresponding to a list of the different prices for each numbered spot. The ad costs differ by location on the train. I have long used this as an indicator, a barometer if you will, of Japan’s economy.
When I arrived back in Japan in the Fall of 2000, these were still all full of ads. Shortly afterwards, blank spots began to appear between ads on commuter lines with lower ridership. More recently, this began on even the most crowded of commuter trains. Yesterday, this particular train car had only a handful of these ad spaces rented to advertisers. The slow disappearance of ads began before idiot phones came to be, while online shopping and thus online advertising certainly play a role in this, these are more recent, confounding factors. Bottom line, the economy here is in bad shape and has been for a long time.
A lot of the undercurrent of the response when I state "masks don't work on respiratory viruses" is that I am a bad, selfish person. That's how they roped in a lot of people into doing it. It feels good to do something that on face value makes sense. After all, the surgeon wears a mask in the OR! It is a minor inconvenience, what could it hurt? Even helping a little helps a lot. It's not for me it's for everyone around me.
Japan is fighting a bigger uphill battle than here in the states because masking is a part of your culture. It isn't here. That by the way was another pro mask rant. "Tha Japanese culture did it, so why can't we?" but in the states we have this "if it feels good, do it" vibe. And that's where it gets cultural with us. For a lot of them, it feels good to mask.
If they can't sell enough ads that they have to put public service messages on the train in a prime position that's really bad. I see that poster is sponsored by http://www.jametro.or.jp/ which is the "Japan Subway Association" i.e. the trade association that the company whose train you are on belongs to.