TOKYO, March 22, 2023—Effective April 1, 2023, all bicycle riders in Japan will be ‘required to strive’ for wearing a safety helmet, ten days after the country’s compulsory COVID-19 face-mask rule was lifted but having little visible effect on the Japanese to remove it, in an onerous sign of peer pressure to thrash out violations in favor of totalitarianism under bureaucracy oversight.
The settings are very different, but this totalitarianism move could accelerate if/when the state seeks to exploit the accomplishments of the famous, as it did in the run-up to WWII: Shohei Ohtani, for one, who March 23, 2023 was labeled widely as ‘the world’s best baseball player’ contributing to Japan’s victory of the World Baseball Classic tournament, like Eiji Sawamura who drew enthusiastic Japanese baseball fans (numerous young Japanese men) to the front line at the order of the Imperial military and was killed by enemy fire.
Sawamura died in 1944 at age 27. His uniform number was 14. Ohtani’s number is 16, the same number as the late Yomiuri Giants manager Tetsuharu Kawakami who was revered as Japan’s baseball giant.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department announced March 20 that the Japanese government has amended the Road Traffic Act and starting April 1, 2023, all bicycle riders – both those that ride and on the back seat such as infants – will be ‘required to strive’ to wear a safety helmet. The Tokyo municipal government’s revised ordinances provide that guardians must ‘make efforts’ to encourage dependents to wear helmets when on bike.
The new act and new ordinances do not have to carry penalties because the Japanese public diligently observes many if not all rules once enforced – like the face-mask mandate against COVID-19 infections. Police officers from local police stations in Tokyo and elsewhere March 22 rode bikes wearing a helmet as ‘an example,’ telling passers-by on bike and pedestrians to wear a helmet when riding a bike, according to Japanese media reports. In a country where the bureaucracy is still viewed (old folks honor/revere) as ‘Kami (god),’ the presence of helmet-clad cops suffices in encouraging people to follow suit (though less so than before).
In fact, it’s a big reason why most Japanese continue wearing a face-mask, indoors and out, 10 days after Fumio Kishida, the prime minister, formally lifted the mask mandate. Whether most Japanese will take off the mask may not be known until April 1 when the relaxed mask wearing rule is scheduled to be lifted in schools and public places in the second stage, meaning public entity workers will become mask-less, and then in early May when With-COVID-19 checklist in offices are scheduled to be abolished.
But whether it’s an implicit policy or not, pro-totalitarianism campaigners look to have score a degree of success in managing Japanese society to one where people would accept government instructions more closely.
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Insight Into the Future