Cellphone Dependency

Stereo Phone

Some fun stats in Asahi Shinbun about cellphone dependency here in Japan in the paper. No, not "do you have a cellphone" - that's close enough to 100% not to matter - but where you bring your cellphone.

The highlights are, I think, that over 90% have their phone next to their bed as they sleep; over 50% bring their phone to the toilet; almost 50% have it next to them as they eat; and almost 20% take it to the bath.

I do wonder how those numbers are skewed by the fact that a lot of people use their phone as alarm clock (we do at home), and that whenever you go to the bathroom at work or outside you bring your pants - and the cellphone in its pocket - to the bathroom with you by default.

 
Oh, and the survey says that 48% of university students secretly use their cellphone during classes. It may be right but a bit misleading; from my experience here the other 52% simply don't bother hiding it.

Dice Rolling Machine

Not my usual fare, I know, but: A guy runs a website that caters to play-by-email boardgame players - backgammon, risk, that sort of thing. He needs lots of random numbers - lots and lots of numbers - and to make the players happy he needs to get them from real dice, not a random number generator. So, proving that anything worth doing is worth way, way overdoing, he built an automatic dice rolling machine that can generate over 1.3 million dice rolls per day:



I am so very envious right now.

Elsevier, again

Remember that fake scientific journal I wrote about? The one that looked like a real research journal, with articles made to look like research papers, and published by Elsevier, major scientific publisher? The one that Elsevier got paid to publish by pharmaceutical company Merck in order to push the now withdrawn medication Vioxx?

That magazine was, as it turns out, not an isolated occurrence. They've owned up to another six such journals and a whole imprint of fifty journals that is dedicated to deliberately push marketing (read that last link for a pretty balanced take). I'm sure it's made Elsevier a lot of money. Not doing a whole lot of good for their credibility of course.

Salaryman Senryū

There's a yearly contest for the best "Salaryman Senryū" (comic Haiku), and this years top ten has just been announced for your reading pleasure. Unlike haiku the composition rules for senryū are relaxed; there's no absolute demand that it adhere strictly to a 5-7-5 pattern for instance. You could see this as a finger on the pulse of the life of the corporate worker; if that's the case, then this year he's worried about growing fat and about losing his job.

My Japanese is pretty bad, still, and I have all the poetic verve of a cement mixer; nevertheless, here's a couple of my favorites in translation:


#4 about a fad diet:

朝バナナ　効果があったの　お店だけ
"Morning Banana" \ its benefits extended \ only to the shop

#5 "metabo", weight increase:

やせたのは　一緒に歩いた　犬の方
excess weight got lost \ when we walked together \ only by the dog

#7 about cost cutting - including bonuses and raises - in the workplace

コスト下げ　やる気も一緒に　下げられる
company cuts costs \ they get cut together with \ my motivation

Namba

Japan Blog Matsuri is a monthly blog roll, where bloggers writes posts around a chosen theme. This months theme is a picture post on your favourite place in Japan.

Me, I like Namba. It's the central district in south Osaka and generally rowdier and less buttoned-up than the somewhat higher class Umeda in the north. This trend continues toward the south with the Tennouji district, infamous for housing some of the poorest and most crime-ridden areas in Japan. Of course "most crime-ridden" still means I'm safer there than I'd be in central Stockholm.

Namba's not beautiful; nor is it old and historical. But it has more life and more happening than any other place I've ever been. I can happily spend a whole day just walking somewhere in the area, not even bothering to bring a camera along. Mill with the people in Doutonbori; check out the weird fashions of Amemura or the arty galleries, restaurants and cafés around Yotsubashi (our favorite Chinese place recently closed, unfortunately); shop for electronics, parts, robots, toys, power tools, audio equipment, manga and DVD in Den-Den town, or any cooking equipment and restaurant supplies you can imagine along Douguya-suji; or check out the clubs and bars of Shinsaibashi if you're in that kind of mood.

Namba in Osaka is perhaps my favorite place in Japan. The area can change dramatically with just a few steps down some street. It's not beautiful even in the best of times, so bad weather is not a problem when you visit.

Shinsaibashi shopping street. If you ever need a crowd, this is where to look.

Host club host going home at dawn. Namba is home to a large restaurant, club and bar district with places ranging from the stodgy to the disturbing.

Towards the south the streets get narrower and the shops get sleazier. Still perfectly safe of course; I've never felt threatened or unsafe anywhere here.

Flu Closings Not Working As Expected

The number of infected is up to 191 people, and a lot of schools are closed for a week. Most infected people are high-school students so I guess it makes some kind of sense. Not all schools are closed, however; as the link above hints, jurisdiction over things like schools is an unholy mess of overlapping and conflicting responsibilities here. The Osaka prefecture, for instance, can order all schools in Osaka prefecture to close - except for those in Osaka city and Sakai city. They're the biggest cities and their schools are not under prefectural control. And private schools are private and can't just be ordered to close.

Of course, the incubation period of the virus seems to range from a day up to nine days, so a week-long break might really be too short to break the chain of transmission. Besides, it's high-school students we're talking about here; compulsive socializers, with a primal urge to see each other at any cost. The kind of people that would meet up during a hurricane just to show each other how cool and unimpressed they are. What are the chances that they simply meet each other out on the town instead, rendering the school closings ineffective? And true enough, the Osaka evening news featured a broadcast from Amerikamura where large numbers of middle- and high-school students have gathered today to celebrate a few days off school.

Street corner in Amerikamura, just a few minutes from Namba in Osaka:¹. The whole area is full of fashion shops of the more embarrassingly juvenile kind - faux-reggae clothes, belt buckles with skulls, t-shirts with pot leaf patterns, that kind of stuff. Teens are drawn to the place like moths to a flame.

Day care centers are also closing. Which impacts young mothers that work part- or full-time. They can no longer go to work since they need to stay home with their kid. According to a television report this morning, many such young parents gather at each others home. That way the kids have friends to play with, and the parents can help each other out so some can go grocery shopping (or even go to work part time) while the others watch the children.

Great idea - except that it defeats the whole purpose of closing the day care centers in the first place. And instead of having the kids watched by trained nursery staff that knows to look for early signs of infection and knows what to do if they see it, you have parents that of course really have little clue about what to do.

To their credit, a number of people have begun speaking up about this current hysteria, and some of the media is giving them a voice. Some doctors have rightly pointed out that many of the current measures don't really work. All they do is disrupt people's lives and incite panic. Our Fearless Leader, Osaka Governor Hashimoto (who seems to be putting on some weight; might want to go easy on the takoyaki there) has called for a step-down on the pandemic response and start treating it more like a normal flu outbreak. The radical measures are out of proportion to the current severity and spread of the disease. This is already happening to some extent. For instance, Osaka city now disregards the guidelines for a pandemic that requires infected people to be treated at hospitals. As most current cases are very mild, people are allowed to recuperate at home if they wish. This alleviates the pressure on the health care system and it's more comfortable for the patient.

So cooler heads may indeed prevail. But this is a country that will panic over the most trivial health issue, so I fully expect the whole nation to have a field day with this over the next month or so.

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#1 If this blog were an actual news outlet I'd have to point out that this is archive footage, not taken today. But it isn't so I won't.

The Flu: Everybody Please Panic In An Orderly Fashion

We seem to have Swine FluThe Flu Formerly Known As PrinceSwine Flu established in Japan¹. We got 3 9 12 32 46 59 96 confirmed cases here in the Kansai region this weekend, and the media is in full disaster feeding frenzy. Every news and commentary program is about this outbreak and they all illustrate their commentary with footage of people wearing paper masks. There's segments about school closings (most victims are high-school students), about the situation in other countries and about how stores are sold out on masks. Solemn university-wide e-mails inform that we're now on Level Two on some scale or another. We should refrain from non-essential travel; contact the university health department if we have any flu-like symptoms; gargle (people are big on gargling here); wash our hands; and of course wear a mask.

People here love masks, and not only during porcine pandemics. You see the masks everywhere during flu season and in spring, when pollen counts are high. They do keep out a lot of pollen, and they stop your coughs and sneezes from bothering others. As a side effect, a mask prevents you from touching your face, a common way to catch infections and the reason we're advised to wash our hands during flu and cold season.

The typical disposable paper mask most people use here.

But the kind of cheap disposable mask the gentleman above is wearing can't really protect you from a virus; it's really little more than a piece of conveniently shaped tissue after all. A real surgical face mask can protect you against bacteria and it has a minor effect against a virus; for reliable protection, however, you need a mask rated for virus protection (the ratings name differ by country; it's called things like P2 or N95). [Note: I'm no physician, so don't take any of this as the plain truth; read footnote #1 below².]

Using real masks is not really an option for most people. First, to use an antiviral mask properly you need to know what you're doing: how to put it on so it fits you tightly and correctly; how long to use it before it needs to be replaced; how to take it off without accidentally touching virus-laden surfaces and getting infected; how to dispose of it so it doesn't infect someone else. Do you know how? I certainly don't³. Also, virus-protective masks are pretty expensive and somewhat uncomfortable.

The reality is that most people will wear the mask wrong, will start to use it but soon give up, or use the mask only when they're seen by other people. I sometimes see people wearing paper masks with the nose uncovered, for instance, completely defeating any protection. Or taking it off when talking on the phone, as if the virus would be polite enough to wait until the call is over before it tries to infect you. Overall, even a real mask would be largely (though not completely) ineffective as a large-scale protection measure.

So while there's a minor benefit to wearing a mask, it seems the typical official recommendation is that you use an antiviral mask if you're in close contact with a sick person (if you're nursing a family member for instance), learn how to use it properly and make sure you really do use it all the time. If you are out and about, there is no reason to bother with a mask as the benefit is very minor.

Are masks - cheap unrated masks especially - completely pointless? No, not at all. There's several reasons to use a mask and avoiding infection is only one of them. A cheap mask won't prevent you from becoming infected but it does protect other people from you. As you breathe, cough and sneeze, the water droplets in the air mostly stay in the mask rather than spreading far and wide. And as we saw earlier the mask prevents you from touching your face. If you aren't diligent about hand-washing this can help stop you from infecting yourself.

But the most important thing about the mask is, I think, that it's a security blanket. People may know or suspect that it's nearly useless in practice, but it gives them a way to do something constructive about a scary, confusing situation they have no control over. It lets people control their fear, and it gives them the confidence to go outside and conduct their daily lives without being paralyzed by fear and uncertainty. The mask is also a signal to others. It shows them that you're mindful of the situation, careful and conscientious. You're wearing a mask so you're probably doing all those other protective measures you're supposed to and thus you're safe to be around. Masks may not slow or stop the spread of virus, in other words, but they may well slow or stop the spread of unfounded panic. And that may in the end be more important than the virus itself.


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#1 Note those "seems" and "I think" in the text: I'm not a medical professional of any kind. I've never studied medicine and I have no more or better information than the average twelve-year old. I have no idea what I'm talking about. This post does not constitute medical advice. Do not depend on information here for any medical decisions. This post may contain information that is outdated, misrepresented or outright wrong. Do not read this and drive at the same time. Keep out of direct sunlight. If a rash, lower back pain, headache or a serious case of death occurs during reading, please consult your physician. Do not mix with isopropanol. Do not eat. Do not cover. Duck and cover. The satanic messages you think you hear when you read the text aloud backwards are just an illusion. Lift with your knees, not with your back. The backstroke is possibly the most scenic of swim styles. You have to be this tall. Void when wet.

#2 It's the one right above.

#3 See footnote #1².