 Okay, we're back for a live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. So happy to talk to Steve Zercher at Kansai Gaida University in Kobe, Japan. And this is looking to the east and indeed we are looking. We want to see what's going on. This is a great way for us to sort of get a reality test on where Hawaii is, visa, v, Japan and Asia. Welcome to the show, Steve. Yeah, my pleasure. It's always good to see you, Jay. So let's get caught up on how COVID is doing and how the governmental response is doing and how people are handling it socially in Japan. Yeah, well, it's mostly a good story. You know, Japan's limited the number of infections, the overall rate for Japan on a total basis is still less than the United States on a daily basis. The number of deaths is still below 1,000. So as a result of the flattening of the curve, which occurred over about a six or eight week period of recommended stay in place, kind of a lockdown light is what Abe now calls it. So that has been lifted and Japan is returning back to normal. Traffic is increasing trains are getting a little bit more crowded businesses are opening schools are also opening my I dropped off my son yesterday at his high school. That was the first day that they allowed students into the semester after about a two month break. So cautiously the country is moving forward to trying to return to the pre Coronavirus days. So how do people feel about that are they nervous about it being the fact that, although you know you have a few cases and you flatten the curve. People feel you're out of the woods so much so that they don't mind going back. From what I can gather. Even though that the national emergency has been lifted. The Japanese people are still behaving in a way that they're showing that they're concerned, for example, the use of masks. If you go out into the public, it's 95%. So there's not this sense of relief. Oh now we can just go back to normal and not continue the cautionary patterns that we have established over the last couple of months. The other day, I went into an office I carry a mask, and I didn't have it on I forgot to put it on and the woman behind the counter even though there was a plexiglass sheet in front of us she said, Where's your mask. So, society still, there's a kind of a confirmation or a reconfirming of the practices that we've established over the last couple of months so even though Abbe has says okay we can now return back to normal. I think overall Japanese people are acting in a way that they're still concerned. And there is some criticism of the government that this has been premature. Unfortunately, recently in Tokyo, and in Kyushu, which is in the city and the Kyushu, the island of Kyushu, there's been a breakout of the disease once again so there's hotspots that are popping up now that these changes have occurred that the state of emergency has been listed and people read about that and they realize that that could potentially happen where they are. There's still a sense of caution I don't, you know, we Japan doesn't have this vocal political culture. There isn't this split, you know, like the anti mask people in America, or the want the people who are saying that the stay in place of polarization that was imposed in various parts of the United States should continue. There isn't that polarization here, but I think that overall people have accepted the lead of the government and they think that they're doing what they think is the right thing to do. But to answer your question, I think there's still a very strong concern that Japan conditions could worsen at any point. So therefore people are behaving the same way. Let me talk about borders for a minute. What borders are open what borders are closed. Oh yeah, and you know, I know that Japan is has taken action on that what action has it taken and what's the current status. Yeah, so of the G seven countries Japan by far is the strictest in terms of restricting entry for foreigners. There's a ban, a total ban on 111 countries. So that's well over. 60% of all the countries that exist in the world, including the United States, including all of Europe, parts of Asia as well. And even for someone like me, I'm a permanent resident I like I'm the equivalent of a green card holder in Japan. If I was to leave the country, and you know, visit the United States for some reason, I would not be allowed back into the country. So the Japan is being very, very strict about controlling entry with a concern that they don't want to import infections. They did I mean they were slow to respond to the virus infections in the beginning. Chinese tourists are coming in in March, you know it was pretty much pretty clear at that time that that was not the right thing to do. But at that point China was number one in terms of the infection rates in Japan was somewhat slow to respond to that and then the diamond princess you probably remember that we had this cruise boat where there was a high infection rate. And the government just decided. Okay, the people who are not obviously sick and just get off the boat and they just went out right off the boat onto the trains under the taxi cabs and so forth. I think there were some initial mistakes made by the government and maybe as a result now. They're being very, very cautious about allowing anybody into the country. There is some discussion of allowing entry to citizens of countries where the COVID infection rate has been diminished, for example, Australia, or Thailand or New Zealand, or Vietnam, all of those countries have been very successful in managing this so there is discussion within the Abe administration to allow business people from those countries in without allow without having a quarantine so they would be a dual test, they'd be tested before they leave, and they'd be tested when they arrive. And if the most of those tests were negative then they could go out and conduct business without a quarantine so there is some limited discussion with countries where the COVID rate is low. And also I know I read recently that Hawaii is trying to propose this to Japan as well. I don't know how interested Japan is in this but Hawaii because their rate is so low and Japan's rate is also low. Potentially Japanese tourists would be allowed into Hawaii. So that would be the reverse of what I just discussed. So that's occurring on a Hawaii basis but overall that's referred to here as the bubble. It would take a certain number of safe countries and put them all in a bubble. It's like the Truman Show, if you remember that movie where there's a bubble over a very successful area and you don't care about what happens outside the bubble. Right. Yeah, but overall it's, if you're planning to visit Japan, if you're an American, you can forget it. Probably through the course of 2020 and maybe into 2021 before Americans will be allowed here. Well that takes me to a question I wanted to ask you. I mean you know the U.S. is certainly, I don't think there's any controversy over this. Trump has done a terrible job. Trump has done a terrible job on informing people, on taking leadership positions and organizing the country to deal with the virus. And I think it's not controversial that you can lay a lot of deaths on his doorstep. So my question though is how do the Japanese feel about that? They must be well informed about it because television is everywhere and the opinion writers in the U.S. reach them and so forth. What's the average Japanese feel about it? Yeah, you're right Jay. The Japanese media covers American politics. The relationship between Japan and the United States is so close, especially when it comes to political issues, international politics, the United States and Japan are usually locked up. So the Japanese government watches what America does very closely and follows its lead in most cases and the interest on the part of Japanese people in what goes on in America is very, very high. My wife sometimes knows more about what's going on in the United States. My wife is Japanese and then I do it. She finds out about this through NHK, you know, which is the National News Agency government sponsored. So basically, I think from my conversations with Japanese people there's a sense of kind of like pity in a way. It's like, my gosh, they really screwed up. You know, it's just terrible how badly America has managed this issue. Now that's in contrast to what's gone on here in Japan. I don't think Abe is seen as a dynamic leader on the lines of like New Zealand or Taiwan, you know, where the leadership there in the government was so proactive and very clearly was the primary reason why the infection rates were so low in those countries. The infection rate is low in Japan for a variety of reasons, but it's not attributed to Abe necessarily. So it's not like they're contrasting Japan and the United States. They're looking at the United States and saying, how can the strongest country in the world with the most resources screw up so badly? And Jay, look at the top three. In terms of infections, you have the United States, Brazil and Russia. I mean, my goodness, you know, dictator leadership, horrible leadership in the case of Russia. I mean, Putin denied the infection for a long, long time, didn't talk about it. Now it suddenly became an issue and their infection rates climbed up in Brazil is even worse than the United States. But the US is in that top three group and Japanese people look at that and go, why? Why is America doing so badly? Well, it extends further than just the COVID. When you say pity, there was an article in the Irish Times a couple of weeks ago by an Irish, popular Irish op-ed writer. And he tracked the image of the United States from after the Second World War till now. And various adjectives have been used to characterize the image of the United States and Europe and around the world. But now he says it's different than any of those adjectives. Now, what the world feels for the United States, and it's not just COVID, it's pity. Yeah, that's what I'm picking up here. It's like, wow, what a screw up. We feel bad. We're surprised, but we feel sorry or a sense of pity with how things are going on in the United States right now. You know, it has direct economic impact. So this school, which normally spends hundreds of students to America on exchange, guess what? All canceled. All, none. So the normally 18,000 students from Japan go to America to study on an annual basis, that number is going to go down to zero. So that has economic impact. Is Japan cancelling their entryway? Who's cancelling? This is our university. The university is making that decision. We're the number one university in Japan for foreign exchange. We send more students out and we accept more students in than any other school. This is one of the key successes of my university. They've been doing it since 1974. So they were a pioneer in promoting international exchange, primarily between America and Japan. So they decided that this semester, they're not sending anybody zero because of the risk. It's just terrible. So that means that group of students will not have the experience of learning about American culture, about American life. Those are future diplomats, future business people who can successfully navigate the cultural differences between the United States and Japan. There's a risk that this will not just be for the fall of 2020, but if America doesn't get its infection rate under control, this could extend even further. So you could have a year gap where there's no foreign exchange coming from Japan to the United States. You just lose all that future productivity, expertise and so forth that is established by those students when they're on a normal exchange program. I mean, I am in Japan because I was an exchange student. There's so many of us that began international careers because of that initial experience of being an exchange student during our undergraduate days. So there's tangible loss and there's intangible loss as a result of mismanagement by the United States on the virus. Right. And it's an unknown loss because we don't know how long it's going to last or whether it's going to come back in the way we'd like to see. It may not do that. You know, people have a way of filling the void, doing other things. Right. But it doesn't end there. I mean, Trump has shut down China. And he's also talked about, I don't know if he's done anything so often he talks about things and doesn't do them. But he talked about throwing the Chinese students who are in American universities out, making them go back to China, there's 330,000 of them. And that's the same net effect because they're not going to be here. They're not going to socialize. They're not going to have a stake in the US. Their whole life experience with the US will be cut short. That happens. And there are other similar events happening all over Asia. I think the same thing is happening in Korea. Southeast, you know, borders are closing. And the US is not having the same kind of exchange experience that it had only four months ago. So I don't know what happens, but I don't think it's a good story for the US. Yeah, so there's a, of course, there's a convention, there's a business organization, which represents international exchange. It's called NAFSA. It runs every year in May in the United States. Of course, this year it was canceled. I've gone two or three times. It's usually 10 to 12,000 people from all over the world. You know, I'm a veteran of these business conferences because of all my days in technology beforehand. That's one of the most fun events to go to because people who are involved in international exchange, you know, they're well educated. They're very liberal, Jay. So, and they're a fun loving crowd. I really enjoy going to that. But if they run it in May next year, how many people are going to show up? Maybe 2,000? It's just going to devastate that entire industry having to do with international exchange. From a business perspective, of course, that's tragic. But as a former exchange student myself, from a human development, from a talent perspective in terms of international appreciation, we're just stealing from the future. It's like we're eating the seed corn right now. Anyway, that's my own perspective. You're talking about these conferences and professional and academic gatherings, they're shut down. And even if they can exist in the US from state to state, they can't be international. Hawaii has so many conferences and conventions where people come from all over the world. I don't think that's going to happen so much anymore. It's not feasible. It's not viable. I'm thinking of the Astronomical Association, for example, they come from everywhere. And all of these professional academic conferences here, they come from everywhere. People don't talk about that in the context of the tourism industry. It's a little different. It's the conference industry. There's a technical name for that. Yeah, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Orlando, that's a huge part of their economic basis and that has disappeared. So just to give you a sense of what COVID has done and also the Japanese government's very strict policy for not allowing foreigners to come in. The last couple of months, the tourism rate year over year is down by 99.7%. So that's actually similar to Hawaii. I know Hawaii's numbers are down an astronomical amount, but Japan is also for international tourism, it's basically evaporated. So there is no international tourism any longer. And there is no international business conferences going on at all. So an American businessman right now cannot come to Japan. He's not allowed. And that will probably continue for the duration of this year, as long as the infection rate in the United States continues to be high. Yeah, and well, if there's a resurgence, that'll guarantee the continuation. Let me turn to what's been happening and what the front page news is in the US. I'm sure that the people in Japan are aware of this as they are everywhere in the world. I mean, we have a correspondent in Varanasi, India. And as you say in Japan, your wife and everybody, they follow American news. This guy lives, he's a student in Varanasi, India. He follows American news. He knows everything that happens moment to moment. I'm assuming everybody in the world, you know, knows in detail how these protests are doing and how they're being played out. Right. It's very disturbing to a lot of people. And I want to get your take on it. I want to try to figure out what how the Japanese are feeling about it. Yeah, I think it's a continuation of the sense that America is falling apart. There was a sense of pity because the COVID-19 issue was mismanaged so terribly and why is America number one in terms of infections and the death rate is over 100,000. It's just astronomical to think about that. And this new news, which you're right, everyone's aware of, is kind of supporting or deepening this impression that somehow the United States is in a very sorry state. And kind of falling apart. So I think that that would be the takeaway. There still is a reserve, a fundamental sense of respect that Japanese people have for America. You know, our students, when they talk about which country they'd like to study in, it's, you know, the majority is the United States. When Trump was elected, now this goes back now at three and a half years, there was some snickering and Japanese politicians were making comments how a reality TV star could become President of the United States, you know, even back then, which, you know, even though I did not support Trump, as you know, I took some offense at that because I am an American. It was really unusual for me to see that. But that kind of died off. But now there's this kind of awareness that, gosh, the United States doesn't seem to be coming up or responding to these challenges. And in the fact that this latest issue is based in racism, which Japanese people are aware of the black, white issue because of stories over decades now, where it's very clear that America has that issue. Japanese like to believe that that's not something that's in their culture, it is, but certainly not to the extent that it is in the United States. So I think the takeaway from what I can gather is that, okay, they screwed up coronavirus mismanaged that became the worst country in the world. And now this racism issue comes up again and people are in the streets, and the governments can't control what's going on and things are spiraling out of control. So I think that that's a sense which I would imagine expands beyond Japan that might be a kind of a worldwide response like you said that article that was written by the Irish journalist that he did a survey of what how American is being viewed in the sense of pity. It's something that's common across different countries, maybe also the sense of what I'm seeing in Japan is duplicated in other parts of the world as well. So there's really two to unpack that a little bit. One is, you know, we, we have racial prejudice, there's no question about it, and we haven't been able to solve it. There's steps have been taken but these things keep happening and they're outrageous. So that's one thing that a person outside the United States could react to, to say, gee, how come, you know, so obvious what, you know, about all the divisiveness in the United States, why can't, why is this still exist. Isn't anybody doing something about it. The second part of the unpack I would like to ask you about is, do you think that the people in Japan and maybe elsewhere are saying that the United States government should be able to control the protest as they happen. In another country, say China. I mean I'm not, I don't want to compare human rights between the two countries but in another country, this protest, these protests would not have been permitted action would have been taken. I mean, are you saying the people in Japan have a similar feeling isn't there a way that the police can deal with this. So people are not burning stores and looting, you know, and so forth. Yeah, I would say, number one, it reinforces the observation that racism is still a significant problem in the United States, despite a black president, you know, not so long ago that a very potent symbol of maybe America being beyond that the fact is America is not beyond that was actually clear, while Obama was still president, at least to us, at least to Americans. And then yeah, the secondary thing is, why is this happening. Granted racism is an issue. Why are there people looting, and why is violence breaking out why why are things getting to that point. So maybe there's some questioning about that and you know my own opinion is it's it's more than the racism issue J. I don't know if you would agree with me on this but I think underneath this is economic dynamic is that the lower class and middle class has just been viscerated since the 1980s and you know the sense of economic uncertainty things we talked about before 40% or 50% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and this virus issue seems to have magnified that. So that's my sense of what's going on in America I think the Japanese people may not understand that aspect of American culture Japan, even though that income inequality that is true here in Japan as well. There's still a sense of cohesiveness within the society and that people are more or less kind of like we're all the same you know it's a homogeneous society and there may be rich people but we're all kind of treated the same way so there's that sense in Japan. So maybe that makes them a little bit less likely to see how important, at least in my view, income inequality is an economic factors are in the United States. And that's what's going on behind this breaking out of violence in America so people are just saying okay. Now we have an excuse to really vent our feelings that we don't have a chance in this country that we're that all the benefits are going to a very narrow segment of society. It's a cocktail of things I mean, surely it's that and we've seen a lot of it in the paper and and I think everyone agrees that the blacks don't get the same fair shake that that the whites do in general. So that could make it that could make you angry after a while but the other the other psychological point and I want to ask you about how this works in Japan is that people have been cooped up for months. They've been living in little apartments, maybe really too small with too many people in the apartment. They don't have money to do anything they don't have enough food or what they want they are living on a very sparse budget. They're worried about whether they could pay the rent all those things and mostly they're in a cooped up space and that changes the way people think, you know, it's like being in jail, and you get angry you you get you get a little crazy. Some people get a lot crazy but that everybody is affected by it to some extent. And I and I wonder and I so I attribute at least part of the breakout here, the protest breakout of the violence to the fact that people have been cooped up for months. What about in Japan. They've been cooped up in Japan to do you have, you know, domestic violence you have people, you know, who do bizarre conduct you have this kind of thing. Yeah, I, where we're not seeing that actually. There's a couple factors one. The Japanese government made it clear that they did not have the right to mandate that people actually stayed in their homes it wasn't like Wuhan and China where there were military people. You know with their jeeps going through the streets where potentially you could get shot if you were out there I mean I don't know if that's true but I remember hearing that. So, Abe said this is what we are recommending. This is what's best for society. We want to achieve 80% reduction in social interaction if we do that then the virus rate will flatten out. They didn't quite achieve that but people in the main agreed with that and did restrict their, they're going out but still people did go out. Yeah, where I live there's a park across the street and during the national emergency. There were plenty of people there, going out so it was kind of a modified lock that it wasn't quite as perhaps as harsh as some states impose the United States so that's one factor but I think also just by the nature of Japanese culture. They understand that even though they might not agree entirely with what the Japanese government did. They accept it. You know so there's not the sense of resentment it's like okay, we need to contribute to reducing this problem because it's for the betterment of the society as a whole. So, wearing face masks. It's not an independence or freedom issue people do it because they recognize that that's something that you need to do in order to protect everybody as a whole. So that sense of community or common purpose. I think has helped mitigate this sense of frustration or being cooped up and is not resulting in increased violence I think the violence crime rates are really very very low in this country to begin with. And are probably lower now than they were six months ago, the police presence is higher I've noticed, and the police seem to be just my own personal observation when you're driving around or walking around please seem to be more prevalent. Maybe their policy is to make themselves more visible, just in case what you're talking about does break out in Japan, but I don't see it. It just doesn't seem to be here in this country. Steve it's always nice to talk to you I so enjoy and I so learn. Where'd our time go Jay it's all it's over already my gosh. Looking forward to the next time Steve searcher.