TOKYO, March 30, 2020—Twice in the 13th century, Kublai Khan’s Mongolian navy attempted to conquer Japan, only to be repelled not necessarily by Japanese samurai forces but by ‘kamikaze’ divine god-sent winds. To this day, Japanese have kept the kamikaze belief deep in the back of their heads, and that’s making them adventurous against the coronavirus pandemic and abetting their discriminating streak about what’s happening in Italy, the United States and other high-infection nations.
On Sunday, March 29, 2020, Tokyo streets and parks were deserted with cherry blossoms looking forlorn absent viewers and party crowds sitting on tarps and toasting and belting karaoke around this time of every year. But it was not really for the soft lockdown request that prime minister Abe and Tokyo governor Koike announced a few days earlier: Heavy, wet snow pelted the city and sakura (cherry) blossoms, making it impossible to throw ‘hanami’ parties. Had it not been snow, crowds should have flocked to parts and streets.
That the Japanese paid little attention to the first social-distancing request in March is evidenced in the fact that the long weekend of March 20-22 drew heavy crowds at popular hanami spots across Japan, and many people were believed to have hit night spots afterwards. Koike said at a news conference last week that new daily infection case spikes resulted from the people’s long weekend adventure.
Japanese televisions and internet sites showed footages of Italy’s surging infection cases, lockdown life and Italians ‘ deaths by the hundreds earlier this month. Most Japanese saw and read the reports as events unfolding in a remote foreign land — as they did when SARS epidemic spread in China and Asian countries – since Japanese cases and deaths remain limited at 1,866 and 54, the latter 0.4 percent per million. And Japanese experts are warning the risks of visiting enclosed spaces, close contracts, and failure to keep social-distancing.
And yet, the Japanese still do not seem to believe the virus’ danger. ‘Asian populations seem to have stronger immunity to this virus than Europeans and Americans,’ a friend of mine told me on the phone when I asked him about his recent lifestyle. Even after the soft lockdown, he visits local restaurants almost daily for lunch or dinner. Yet another friend, who is a contract worker dispatched by a human resources agency to the Tokyo city office, commutes to that office even though Governor Koike urged for telework instead of physically showing up in office.
That the Japanese bureaucracy is grasping the pandemic’s danger half-heartedly is evident: A city office in central Japan is asking members of a local volunteer group to attend meetings in the early part of April right in the middle of Abe’s soft lockdown period.
Where is this Japanese complacency or boldness come from? Clearly, deep in the back of Japanese people’s head lurks the kamikaze belief, the belief that the land of the rising sun and its people are indomitable and immune to foreign attacks, the belief that seemed to have first come to be used after two aborted Mongolian massive navy attacks against Japan in 1274 and 1281. In both, powerful gusts of wind – the divine kamikaze wind – ravaged the Mongolian fleets, toppling hundreds of their battle ships and drowning most of the soldiers.
During the latter part of World War II, when the Japanese imperial army was losing battle after battle in the Pacific theater, its commanders would bow in front of the Shinto shrine alter for kamikaze to repel the approaching U.S. and foreign military forces. Did their payers help?
–Toshio Aritake