Essay

Part Five — Fear of the unknown

By Garry Bassin

Recently, when I went to greet a friend arriving on a Japan Airlines flight from Tokyo, it was pretty funny to see that 99 percent of the Japanese passengers were wearing face masks. After weeks of the Japanese media making a huge story out of the swine flu (which is a very small story here) the assumption was that by wearing a face mask you would be somewhat protected.

One week after that flight arrived we were all having dinner in Honolulu. The total number of flu cases in Hawaii was five, and the number of Japanese flu cases had just jumped to 133 overnight. Had anyone actually looked at the data, it would have been easy to see that most of the people catching the flu were young, and very few were over 50 years old. In addition, face masks don't really make a difference -- and there was more danger in Japan than Hawaii.

It's not that I don't agree to use caution when traveling abroad. In general, your body is vulnerable after changing time zones and when you come off of an airplane that has bad recirculated air. Nor am I not worried about the outbreak of an international plague. Yes, it is, and could get, very scary. My point though is not about how to avoid the flu, but rather how you shouldn't believe everything the Japanese media tells you on television and live in fear about everything around you.

Notorious for creating "a mountain out of a molehill," the Japanese media, in its endless search for exciting material to fill up television time, has been known more than once to mislead the Japanese population. Sensationalism, which in most countries is considered "rumor" or "scandal," is on Japanese television nightly as "official news." On the other hand, the Japanese media, very conscious of the advertisers that support the programs, will occasionally NOT run certain stories for fear that those clients will pull their advertising off the air and they will lose their revenue. Many years ago I was in Tokyo when a Japanese "news" network had gone to a major American city to film the police make a "real" arrest of a rape in progress, but when there weren't any rape incidents after a week of waiting, they decided instead to stage an arrest with actors, so they could show the Japanese public "how dangerous America is." I'm sure that everyone that saw the finished program believed that America was in fact, a very scary place.

The Japanese media has for years created propaganda that makes everyone believe that everywhere and everything else outside of Japan is unsafe and dangerous. This has created a society of Japanese that are easy to exploit and afraid to move freely about the planet. The truth will set you free, and that's the last thing you want people to have if you want to keep control of their minds.

Shukan ST: June 26, 2009

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