Why the Japanese love wearing facemasks

On any given street in Tokyo today, almost everyone will be wearing a mask. The Covid-19 death toll in Japan is around 1,500 in a country of 126 million people. This is dramatically less than the UK’s, yet everyone still covers up, and there are hardly any anti-mask movements of the sort that have become popular in Europe and America.

Why are the Japanese so happy to wear masks, when it makes some people from other nationalities so cross? The first reason is the most obvious: to avoid spreading germs. Not catching germs, mind — spreading germs. It is considered bad manners in Japan to have a cold or a cough without trying to contain the bacteria or viruses being discharged.

Of course, Japanese people, like anyone else, also wish to avoid catching germs. That’s what it says on the poster from the 1920s, pictured above: ‘This man has no care for his own life!’ There’s been much talk about the fact it’s the countries which suffered most from Sars that responded best to the coronavirus, but the Japanese were masking up long before Sars. It was, in part, the Spanish flu pandemic and its aftermath that changed the culture, alongside other significant factors.

In Japan, pollen allergy is a big problem. During the period after the war, the government covered Japan with millions of cedar and cypress trees to supply timber for the construction industry. The unforeseen consequence of all the planting was that every year from about January to May an invisible soup of pollen descends on urban areas and makes the lives of about a quarter of the population a misery. Some Japanese have been known to emigrate to get away from it; others just put on masks.