The masks of culture (in the Corona-world = Introduction)

Corona (Covid-19) has been a topic of this blog since March 19. with subsequent posts. This crisis exposes important facts, that are normally not covered in the pictures of a normal life. Climate Change is very abstract, this is also the fact for other changes since the late 20th century, like the ongoing loss of biodiversity. The Covid-19 crisis, however, is affecting the daily outcome of most of the people of this planet directly or indirectly.  

This graph from the John Hopkins University illustrates the global situation, especially, when compared to the graph at the post from the situation of 20/3/2020. However, the data also point to a problem: Why are the number of the cases develop so differently between different countries?  Of course the most obvious short answer, refers to the actions (or not actions) taken by the national governments. But the interesting background of an pandemic is that the number of cases really reflect the situation on the ground. If the government is advising the people to stay at home, but they are not following this request or order the number of cases is going up. And in this respect the situation in Japan is interesting, because if you look at the government`s actions, especially testing (the Guardian article from 2.April 2020). The data is a bit old, but it shows clearly the tendency: Japan was not very strict, in the beginning, later the country also moved into a lock down and testing regime got more strict. But compared to Germany, where the testing was quite strict from the beginning, test number of cases are considerably lower in Japan. And here come one factor, which can be named the factor "culture", which sounds of course in the beginning quite abstract and complex. In this very case "culture" is showing through the use of masks. The difference between high context and low context cultures (Wp) is still quite abstract. But a look at the history provided by the book (Horii 2012) shows that the Japanese custom of using masks can be traced back to Influenza pandemic 1918 (Wp gives an overview). The historical background provided shows one aspect of the "culture", the willingness to wear masks. 

Reference:

Horii, Mitsutoshi (堀井光俊, 2012), masks and Japanese,マスクと日本人、出版社shi