Our Man in Japan Doesn't Know What to Think

By Iain Aschendale · Mar 17, 2020 · ·
  1. Another coronavirus blog entry.

    The rate of infection in Japan is quite low.

    If you believe the government and the Japanese media.

    No, this isn't a random screed against the mainstream media or government coverups. It has been well-documented for decades that the Japanese media is absolute shit.

    See, they run on a "press-club" system here. In order to gain access to officials for interviews, news organs and their reporters need to be members of the "Reporters Club," or in Japanese kisha kurabu.

    From Wikipedia:

    Members of the press club are allowed to attend news briefings by goverment officials. Those briefings consist of the official reading out the government's official position on whatever the issue is and handing out an information packet. Questions are discouraged, and news media are expected to report the information given to them without question or analysis. News media who report information contrary to the government line find their membership in the clubs cancelled.

    Now, I'm not saying that there is a government push to censor the truth about the coronavirus in Japan. I am, however, saying that if there was we wouldn't know it until it was too late.

    And Japan has a miserable record of dealing effectively with disasters. During the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the people in charge of dealing with the reactor meltdown were frantically dumping water into the core in an attempt to keep it from going completely to hell. The prime minister delayed the cooling efforts by questioning the choice of using seawater rather than fresh water, and at one point there were instructions given (and ignored) to stop the cooling of the reactor core so the PM could overfly the site and see the extent of the damage unobscured by the rising water vapor.

    Japan is a very hierarchical country, so when someone at the top of the food chain decrees that there's no problem, it's up to everyone below him (and it is always a "him" here. Only 10.2% of the members of the Diet are women, ranking Japan 123rd out of 189 for female participation in politics) to make sure that the problem cannot be detected.

    Japan has an extremely high population density. The official figures don't reflect the fact that much of the mountainous inland is effectively unpopulated. Vatican City officially has the fourth-highest population density in the world, but those 1000 priests would barely fill one train on the Osaka Midosuji subway line.

    [​IMG]

    High population density, favorite weekend destination for Chinese and Korean tourists over the last 5-10 years, supine press, and generally incompetent governance.

    I'm not saying there is a problem with coronavirus here, but I won't be surprised if the veil falls and we're truly fucked.

    Time will tell.

Comments

  1. GrahamLewis
    I hope you are wrong but fear you are not. But don't get me started about American federal government denial and BS and wrong choices.

    To borrow a worn cliche, it's so hard to get one's head around this whole thing, because it's invisible and the world looks like "normal" unless you want to eat out or buy toilet paper. And if containment works, nothing overwhelming will happen and there will be those who will say, "see, told you, no big deal." And if it doesn't work . . . . .
  2. Iain Aschendale
    I just wanna eat toilet paper.

    And have someone else do the dishes.
      GrahamLewis likes this.
  3. dbesim
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