A few months ago, at the point in time when the swine flu craze was just two or three weeks old , I stepped onto a train in Osaka to realize that of the 30 or so people in the carriage, I was the single person not wearing a medical face mask. One might think that the general Japanese population was just being cautious: the swine flu had already caused hundreds of deaths world wide, and there were reports of over one hundred swine flu cases within Japan.
What is interesting is that after only one week, everything had returned back to normal. People had stopped wearing masks, and I was even asked by a girl about why I was wearing a mask in a website profile picture.
“The swine flu is finished” she said.
The rest of the country seems to have had that same attitude because despite reported Japanese swine flu cases reaching over 5000 within the following months, I never again saw an unusual use of masks. The prevailing attitude appears to be that the swine flu was just a fad that was over the instant the media lost interest.
It's fairly easy to argue that blind belief in whatever the media has to say might be the only way many people know how to react to it, and that the idea of questioning the reasoning or factual basis of a report or story never crosses peoples' minds. To give one more example, just this week I found out that there is a large number of people in this country that believe that the hunting of whales and dolphins actually helps to maintain some sort of balance in the oceans and is thus, good for the environment. Of course I haven't personally done any research to check that this notion (in whaling being good for the environment) is false, so claiming it is nonsense would be a little hypocritical of me at this point in this blog post, but at the very least I am willing to doubt it.
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