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Here’s this week’s Media Mix about stories in the press that focused on the spread of the coronavirus within households and how people coped with the danger. Much has been written about how Japan dodged a bullet with regard to COVID-19, and while we’re not out of the woods yet, it appears that most of the decisions made by the authorities were good ones. I have nothing profound to add to the argument, but based on what I’ve read and seen it doesn’t seem to be a big mystery. Essentially, the Japanese people did what they were supposed to do—they self-isolated to the best of their abilities until they were told it was safe to come out. Did the government act too late? I think so, but hindsight isn’t very helpful in this case, and comparing Japan’s actions and results to, say, South Korea, which acted sooner, has its problems. I believe that nervousness about the Olympics did affect the authorities’ decision-making. They didn’t really become serious about a possible state of emergency until some countries said they would not send athletes. But in the end they did take action, and the effectiveness of that action was reflected in where the virus was concentrating, i.e., in hospitals and among family members, the two places where it was very difficult to prevent contact between the infected and the non-infected. That tells me that people were doing as they were told, but whether this is due to some inherent virtue of the Japanese people I won’t say. Unlike in the U.S., those who feel unfairly put out by orders to shut down the economy didn’t raise their voices as much. The biggest problem in bringing the disease under control was systemic. As we pointed out in a previous column, Japan was perilously unprepared for the pandemic because of the government’s health service cost-cutting campaign, which has been going on for decades. Many hospitals teetered on the verge of operational collapse, and there were many stories in the media about people desperately trying to get medical attention and who were refused simply because they had to be almost on death’s door before a doctor would see them. Luckily, these cases were minimized thanks to the public’s efforts at social distancing and local public health centers’ individual efforts, which may or may not have had anything to do with central government directives. But the truth of the matter is obvious: Japan did as well as it did because it has universal health care and the government, once it made up its mind, acted in a concerted manner. In that regard, its response wasn’t really that much different than South Korea’s or Taiwan’s or other countries that didn’t see the kind of misery you see in the U.S., which does not have universal health care and where the response was woefully uncoordinated. Japan, of course, is going to suffer economically for quite a while, but a lot of people are alive who otherwise wouldn’t be if different decisions had been made. And obviously, Japan doesn’t need to change its constitution to effectively respond to the next pandemic.

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about reviving the discussion of decentralizing government and financial functions in Tokyo as the COVID-19 crisis reveals how vulnerable Japan is when everything is concentrated in the same place. The argument for decentralization has two compelling points here. Concentration of these functions makes it more difficult to self-isolate and carry out physical distancing measures in a bid to alleviate the spread of the virus; and the attendant disruption of business-as-usual becomes more acute when everybody is in the same place, especially in the case of the public sector, which should be coordinating an effective response to the crisis.

The point about hair grooming businesses at the end is offered with tongue in cheek. The Huffington Post article that brought up the matter was essentially looking at one industry whose very nature is directly affected by physical distancing, since cutting hair requires close contact between service provider and customer. Consequently, the barbers interviewed in the piece are of two minds—they have been trying to address the circumstances of their profession in order to minimize infection vectors, mainly by incorporating stringent disinfectant practices and scaling back on patrons. But they know that there is only so much they can do in their particular situation, and at least one of them believes barbershops should be closed and business owners compensated in some ways by the government. In a sense, she’s actually angry that the central government declared barbershops and hair salons in Tokyo “essential services” because that means if she closes her shop voluntarily for the good of her community, she has to take a loss in income. If the government ordered her to close, they would, logically, at least, be expected to provide subsidies.

The Huffington Post makes a comic jab at the LDP in its headline for the article, which says, in effect, “Politicians, are you really going to go to your barber now?” What this says to me is that Diet members are still in the public eye and therefore need to keep up appearances, so when they say that hair cutting services are essential, they mean for themselves. From what I understand, there are dedicated barber shops in Kasumigaseki and Nagatacho that cater only to government people, be they elected officials or bureaucrats. As I said in the column, the LDP has not insisted on keeping barber shops open in other cities, so the focus on Tokyo becomes a bit more suspicious. We wouldn’t want any cabinet members walking around with fly-away pompadours and unruly ear hair.