“Put on a mask before you go out,” my mother insisted, “people are getting punched in the face for not wearing one.”
I paused at the front door, about to argue that punching someone in the face seemed like a good way to get a viral disease, or least a bad bacterial infection, and that in the unlikely event that an unusually aggressive Japanese person punched me, that I’d just spit in the person’s face with my mono saliva. Instead, I put on the flimsy mask that was a little too small for me, resulting in large gaps on the sides. I braced myself for the discomfort of feeling my breath condense onto my face for the next few hours.
Tokyo has been a strange place recently, made even stranger by the global panic that hadn’t seemed to affect this particularly densely populated city until approximately 48 hours ago. While entire countries went on lockdown, Japan seemed to be doing what Japan does best: pretending that what’s actually happening, isn’t. That’s not to say nothing changed: cafes and stores were emptier on weekends, my local grocery store now has a limit per person on certain products, and bakeries started to individual wrap their breads and pastries. This raised the question of how many people’s saliva I had been consuming with my chocolate croissants until this point in time.
Yet, while Covid-19 ravaged the rest of the world, Japan’s number of cases had stayed at suspiciously low numbers, most likely due to the delusionary dreams of holding the Olympics sometime in 2020. Once that dream was finally killed off by Norway, Canada, New Zealand, and the fact that large numbers of people around the world were dying, a measured panic has ensued. We have currently been advised by the mayor of Tokyo to try to stay in this weekend.
It’s stupid. It’s stupid and frustrating that the politics and projected financial loss of the Olympics has discouraged a policy of more stringent social distancing here in Japan. Even with the large number of seniors that make up the Japanese population, bars, restaurants, and gyms remain open and people commute to work in crowded trains as usual. They just have more masks on now.
It’s also scary, made more frightening by the fact that governments are not incentivized to be transparent with information about the spread of the disease. But if the grocery store shelves becoming bare the night of the mayoral weekend semi-lockdown announcement are any indication, it seems people are concerned, and that’s comforting. Because we all should be a little more worried than they tell us to be.
Working virtually means my daytime routine hasn’t changed much; but as I live with my relatively elderly parents, one which has a lung condition, I’ve stopped going to the gym and have been refraining from regular social interaction since I survived mono. A week or so ago, caving to the basic human need to interact with someone not my parents, it resulted in a fit of first-world isolation anxiety. I began to ruminate on how deep my depression could go in these Covid-19 times and preemptively panicked because there was no way calculate the time I had left until my sanity unraveled. Would it be weeks, or days? I wondered. I half-heartedly started to flip through one of the piles of used, cut-up magazines on my floor with the hope of retiring a few to the recycling bin. An image caught my eye and brought back fond memories. The background blur of an ad sparked an idea.
The thing that’s easy to forget is that isolation doesn’t put your life on hold. It doesn’t make you any less expressive or creative; instead, it provides the unexpected gift of more time. It’s a time to create, learn a new skill, take online classes, or simply find a hobby. Because based on age and pre-existing medical conditions, even if chances are you low you won’t die from Covid-19 if you go out, you might spread it, and ultimately, someone else might.
So be safe everyone, and kind, and remember to wash those hands