 You know, that's Steve Zercher. He's with Kansai Gadae University in Kobe, Japan, joins us every two weeks to give us a sort of status report on what's going on. And it's very important that we talk to him, looking to the East, checking it out. Because it's a flat world. I mean, as Milton, what's his name, Treatment, Thomas Treatment said a long time ago and it's flatter now and it's all interconnected. And the U.S. is very well connected with Japan and more than really, more than any other Asian country. And so we need to know. So Steve, you know, I just want to say that, you know, I feel that our time is being stolen away from us and I'm writing a piece about it. I feel that we're of all the flowers and the hour is gone. You know, it's been months, you know, since we really saw the light of day. It's been months since we were able to engage properly with our friends and relatives. We've been stuck in a corner, holed up for all this time and the prospects are not good for the future. I mean, even those who have jobs go back to work in this very dangerous time. They still don't go out much. And I think this is having an effect on them. I know it's having an effect on me. And you probably have the same problem, don't you? Yeah, first of all, you know, as you can tell, I'm wearing a mask. I know we're more than two meters apart between Japan and Hawaii. But I just want to make the point about this country and the mask usage. I'll answer your question. But first, let me tell you, the national emergency has ended weeks ago. If you go out on the streets, 99.9% of the people are still wearing masks. The government's not saying a word about this. It's just a part of the social culture now. Everybody is taking a precaution. So to answer your question, I feel the same way as you do the last four months, three, four months, it's been like living in a bad science fiction novel. You know, I'm not a huge fan of science fiction. I've read some good stuff, but I've also read some bad stuff. So I know what the bad stuff is like. And I do, I really feel the same way as you. This chapter of my life has just been lost to this kind of vague reality that we've been living in where you really can't make sense of it, that everything all of a sudden becomes unknown. But I do think that there's a difference between this country, Japan, and America. Because Japan, as you know, for reasons we still don't understand clearly, seems to have managed the virus relatively successfully. It's certainly not due to the government. There's a lot of articles that are appearing now having to do with Japanese culture, like this mask issue, 100% of Japanese people are wearing masks now, even though the numbers are way down, the curve has been flattened. So I think collectively, there may be a sense of what you're describing in Japan, but now that the national emergencies ended, things are kind of coming back up to normal. Japanese people, I don't think they're like fully 100% engaged like they were before Corona, but they seem to be coming up to speed, you know, baseball activity, the roads are crowded again, you know, the economy is beginning to recover a little bit. But I think in the US, it's just the news continues to be bad. The economic news and then the virus infections are going up. And then in addition, there's the Black Lives Matter issues that are going on. So that I think is making this non-reality period that you're describing maybe be stronger and more extended in the United States than what I feel it's going on here in Japan. A smile, personal opinion, a response. I appreciate that. I think the difference is in the US, we've had very confused signals from our government. If you sat in front of the tube for the past 90 days, you would be confused. You would be confused about how it's doing the number of cases, why the number of cases, who's at fault for the number of cases. You'd be confused as to the medicines, as to the progress. You'd be confused as to who's saying what. You'd be confused as to how to conduct your life. And as a result, people fall back on this very strange, what I want to call it, inter-directed, libertarian view of it. Liberty. Liberty means I can get out of my house. Liberty means I don't have to wear a mask. Matter of fact, I'll beat up anybody who, some people, I'll beat up anybody who requires me to wear a mask. Jay, that is an American thing. It is. You've never, never, never seen that here in Japan. There's nobody objecting to using the mask. In fact, the social pressure in Japan is so strong that it's 99.9%. I'm serious, Jay. You go into Costco, department stores, you go on the streets, you go on the train. Everybody is doing this in an effort for the collective good. It's not an issue. It's just not discussed at all. So this libertarian, this freedom message, that's unique to the United States from my perspective. It goes a step further, Steve. I monitor the comments on our YouTube channel so often, I mean really often, like I'd say at least once a day, maybe two times a day. We get some, we do a lot of shows about COVID. I mean, it's our world. Yeah, it's the number one topic. Number one topic. And we get these messages from people, serious messages, who continue to claim that COVID is hoax. Now, this is what Trump said months ago. And of course, he left that position in the road a long time. But he said it, and there are people who are still on it, it's a hoax. So what you have is, I guess it would have to start with ignorance and go way beyond that to irrationality and stupidity. There are people in this country that don't believe that COVID is happening. That's why they don't wear masks. Yeah, isn't it a reflection of politics? Doesn't it demonstrate the polarization that people will believe crazy things if it aligns with their ideology or what Trump says, like taking drugs that have no power to help you with the coronavirus or not wear masks, which he continues to not do. So you're taking, I mean, that's, I think every issue is politicized, but this is a public health issue where it's very clear there is a common goal, a common good. But yet that instinct, that habit that's been cultivated what since the 80s, basically in America will take a public health issue where it's very clear what the right policy is because you can look around the world and see what is done correctly and what has been done. Look at Brazil. Brazil's following the same policy more or less as America and look at the results. It's very, very clear. But yet people, because of politics, are blinded to that and will continue to say it's a hoax or that Obama is still from Kenya. I mean, there's still 40% of Republicans who believe that. It's just insane stuff. It is insane. Now, what happens is you have people who simply don't take COVID seriously. They don't take the infection or the infectiousness of it seriously. They don't take the risk to life and limb seriously. I don't know if they don't read or don't think or a combination. But then, you know, what happens is you say, as he did, okay, we're done. We've prevailed. We're going to reopen right now without ever having, you know, addressed the disease itself. So that's like, you know, the old thing about, you know, how can you determine insanity? It's when you keep on doing the same thing and you expect a different result. Well, the result is, it's happening. The result is the same. You go out on the street, you breathe on people, they breathe on you. Everybody knows that droplets carry the virus and everybody gets sick. And so the curve is going up, including in Hawaii. We need to talk about that. Are the numbers going up in Hawaii now? Well, yeah. Oh, that's sad to hear. Hawaii used to be the best state in the country. Well, we opened up the tourism to some extent and this is what you get. But I don't think people take it seriously. If the government says it's okay, well, think about the street. You know, if you take a drive around Honolulu, see a lot of cars now, everybody going out. It's almost like business as usual, except that, you know, I've been a lot of people who are concerned about this are still staying home. What I get though in the U.S. is the curve is going up. Trump has not addressed, I mean, even disbanded the task force effectively. And so what you have now is a resurgence, a second wave. You know, my concern is that that is going to affect the rest of the world, too, because of his bully pulpit, because the U.S. has remnants of leadership. And so, I mean, I think Japan ought to be concerned. So, so here, for example, what did I read? Japanese immigration authorities announced conditions for reentry of foreign residents. You saw that, that title around. I did. Yeah, that was very interesting. A couple of weeks ago, they began to consider allowing entry for selective countries that have lower rates of infection. So it's called the travel bubble, which, as far as I know, was started by Australia and New Zealand, so that they can fly across. So the Japanese government is considering to do this. The countries, you will not be surprised that the United States is not included in that four, given that there's, what, over 2 million infections in the country. So it's Thailand, Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand. And what's behind this is I read the data for the number of international tourists or international visitors, not just tourists who came to Japan in the month of April. It was 143. It's 99.9 percent down from the previous year. So what's happening is the tourism industry is just being devastated. There's a lot of parallels between Japan and Hawaii. We're an island nation here in Japan and you're an island state. You guys have the same numbers. I think it's 99.7 percent or 99.8 percent. So the government is under pressure from the tourism industry to make some exceptions for those countries where the risk would be perceived to be lower. So those are the four countries and they're trying to figure out the policy to do that same way Hawaii is trying to figure this out as well. You know, doing testing before the business people or tourists get on the plane and then testing again once they go through immigration in Japan. So there's kind of a double testing process or trying to figure this out at the moment. The other factor behind this it's not really talked about is that, as you know, Japan has this huge demographic problem. You know, Japan's population is going down significantly. The birth rate continues to go down. You know, it's way below the replacement number of 2.01 or something like that. It's like 1.4 even going down now. So for service jobs, not tourism related jobs. When I'm talking about working at 7-Eleven or Starbucks or those kinds of places in Tokyo, if you go to a 7-Eleven in Tokyo, there are no Japanese people there working at all. They're all tourists or students. You know, they're on a student visa and they have the ability to work part-time up to, I think, 30 hours. So those industries are being devastated by the ban as well. So there's economic pressure on the Avi Administration to selectively allow some Thai people in or Vietnamese people in because they'll come in as students going to Japanese language schools, quote unquote. And then they become low-cost labor in places where Japanese people won't work. So that's what's behind this, Jay. And, you know, I think you can think of the Hawaii economy, too. The hotel industry, the airline industry, other industries are probably pressuring Ige to start inbound trans-Pacific tourism for those reasons. And he has to balance public health. Now, that article came out. And then just a few days ago, some intellectuals, professors are making the countercase. So this is a professor from Hokkaido University, very well-known school. And they're very concerned about allowing people in, even under these testing regiments that they're talking about. And they run some models on allowing people in and the estimated infection rate of those people. And then what the result would be of having those people come into Japan. And what they're saying, I won't go into the numbers here because it would take too much time, but they're saying that, let's say a thousand people are let in and 10 of those people have the infection. And if you test and do quarantine, still some people will get out and start circulating and they'll begin the infection. And their various models indicate there's probably a 90% chance that the coronavirus infection rate will skyrocket again. So there's this economic push to try and open up tourism for the tourism industry and also for labor reasons, but then you get intellectuals, researchers, and other people who honestly believe that it would be too soon to really safely do that. So the government obeys in a tough position, just like e-gays, in a tough position to try and balance these competing interests. It's a tough situation that's going on right now. Well, you don't have to be a scientist to know that taking my temperature with one of those manual temperature readers, which are not all accurate, by the way, the average cost of one of those is about 60 bucks. It's not like really high tech. Taking temperature doesn't really tell you that much. Because the person could be completely asymptomatic and we know now, although I don't think CDC has been candid about it, I don't think anybody's been candid. The government is so interested in protecting the economy and avoiding panic. I think we know now for certainty that you can be completely asymptomatic and spread virus everywhere. And so you're right, 10 people get through, that's an epidemic already. 20 people, and so forth, and they're out of control. And we're not tracking them, we're not tracking them. We let them in, but we don't think that they're sick, so we don't track them. This is very risky business. Even one person could be patient zero and start it all up. And he could go out and shake hands with everybody and violate the distancing rules and not wear a mask and what have you. I think it's safer in Japan than here, but here there's really no limit. Yeah, the Japanese policy now is like super strict. So there's a list of 111 countries that are on the complete ban list, which includes the United States, all of Europe. These four countries that I mentioned to you would be the exception there. So Japan has been extremely strict about turning away people. Even Jay, even me, I'm a permanent resident, I'm a green card holder. I've been living and working in Japan for decades. My family is here, my life is very clear that I'm committed to living in Japan. If I left Japan, I visited you Jay and we had a martini like we've been planning to do for so long. Someday. I go back to try and fly into Japan and guess what? I can't come back. They won't let me in either. They've been very, very strict about this. So Japan has taken that kind of hardcore of the G7 countries. It's had the strictest regulations on allowing visitors in. As I mentioned, it's like one tenth of one percent from the previous year that are coming into the country. So where does this go? This thing that you read about would be an exception to that for those countries that have a low COVID rate. In America, the way things are going there, it's going to be, I don't know, at least another year, maybe even longer before any Americans will be allowed in Japan. They're going to have to develop a real vaccine. That's the only way. Trump is going to try to make us believe that he somehow handled this before November, but that's a long shot that anybody will believe that or anything he has to say about it. So what you have is, I agree, it'd be a year. It's not clear. One doctor, I've talked to him a couple of times, said, don't assume that we'll ever have a vaccine. This is a tough one. This is a very deadly, dangerous virus, and it's not clear that we'll ever be able to lick it. We'll just have to learn to live with it. That means changing our lifestyle everybody on the planet. But going forward, just trying to extend the events that are happening now into the future, the straight line, what you have is probably a resurgence. At the same time, in fact, I'm clear there is a resurgence. It's happening right now. At the same time, we have limits on immigration. And at the same time, we have the tourism industry and other industries that are dependent on travel and tourism and international or exchange between Hawaii and the mainland, whatever it is. Trying to open things up reopening because they believe, rightly so, that in a few months, we're going to have a problem. For example, Sauce Brothers is a big tuck and barge operation out of Portland. They've been servicing Hawaii for 47 years, and they carry a lot of goods to Hawaii. They terminated the route in the morning paper. Because their people can't get into the state? No, I think it's because it's not profitable for them for some reason. Who knows what other factors are on them? What I'm saying is the economy is drying up under us. The newspaper dropped a very substantial percentage of its reporters in the news over the weekend. That's the Honolulu Star advertiser. So there's all these things happening to the economy. We see some of it. We catch some of it. But if you look carefully, look under your feet, you see the economy here is very badly affected. It's declining. It's failing. And on the mainland, I would say the same. In many places, I would say the same. So this big-time pressure, you know, to keep on trucking, even though we know we're having a resurgence. And that's, I think, a problem in Japan. Because you have 100 million visitors a year, something like that. It's a lot of people. We were expecting for this, if the Olympics had occurred and everything went smoothly, it would have been 40 million visitors. Okay. Well, you're not going to get them. And what does that do to the economy? Also, people elsewhere buying Japanese manufactured goods, which are known to be very high quality and all that, but they don't have any money, because the economy in their community is failing. So this has an effect on everybody, including people in countries that are safer. So what I'm asking is, you know, from a business point of view, where does this take us? Because I don't think we're getting the straight skinny. Well, yeah, I don't know 100% for sure either because the Japanese government will talk the happy talk just like every government tends to do so. We are in a recession, though. There's no getting around that. We've had two straight quarters of negative growth. We'll probably have another one in this quarter. So Japan is officially in a recession. That began to happen before coronavirus and coronavirus obviously made economic situation worse. There's not a sense of panic. There's kind of a neutral opinion about how things are going to evolve economically. Like you mentioned in Hawaii, I see here as well, people returning to their normal activities. The unemployment rate here is nothing like America. Again, the real number, who knows? Because the Japanese government doesn't report the real number, but officially it's still in the 3.5% range, which is low. Of course, Japan has limited number of people. There's more jobs than people, so we're in kind of a unique situation to begin with. Even if the economic activity goes down, there's still probably more jobs than there are people applying for them in this country. That's unique to Japan. So that may be one factor that's creating the sense of... It's not positive. People aren't optimistic. In fact, there tend to be a little bit pessimistic more so than normally, but it's not to the point where there's a sense of dread or fear that the Japanese economy is just going to fall off the cliff. Now, it may. That's a possibility, but that's not generally what's being reported, and that's not what I'm sensing is the overall sensibility of how people are looking at what Japan needs to face. Now, there may be a change in government. There's a lot of frustration with the current government that corona has really affected politics, like Trump's numbers are going down finally, and the guy in Brazil, I forget his name, his numbers are tanking. He's such an awful leader there. Obviously, he's dropped down to the lowest they've ever been. So he may be out soon. So that may cause some change potentially. Well, what's interesting is everybody says it's a challenge, and we have to meet the challenge. We do have the goods to meet the challenge. We just have to make some sacrifices here and there. And you do see organizations and institutions and individuals who are very creative about how they deal with it in their world, in their job, in their company. And you got to give them credit for that, because that is a long haul kind of mentality that'll get us through if everybody does that. But I don't think everybody is doing that. There's a lot of people who do not entertain innovative thoughts, and they're not going to be able to belly up to the problem. I think in Japan, there's a lot of people who are innovative, and they will belly up. But the problem is the borders. The problem is the travel. It's risky business. And if you want to stop a ripple effect surge, and then a research, and then a research, and before we've licked the virus, you have to take draconian steps. Right now in Beijing, there are 50 brand new cases. They haven't had any cases in weeks at all in Beijing. Now all of a sudden, there are 50 cases. And then certainly, they're going to find out how those 50 cases got started. But they're taking, as they always do, draconian methods to stop it from spreading. We can learn from them, including Japan, including the United States, even though Trump fights with the Chinese all the time and doesn't take advice and all that. Sure. Yeah. So yeah, there's been a resurgence, on a moderate level of resurgence in Tokyo. So there were 47 cases just yesterday, whereas the number of cases had been very, very low for quite a while. So they're beginning to think again about reinstituting policies to try and reduce the chances for the coronavirus to be spread in Tokyo. Tokyo was kind of the epicenter of infection for Japan, as you can imagine. You have 30 million people crammed into a relatively small area. But yeah, like in Hunan, Wuhan, I'm sorry, they had an outbreak of 50 infections and they tested six and a half million people in two weeks in China. So it's just incredible. So Japan still doesn't do testing. We've talked about this before. I looked up the numbers. Relatively speaking, tests per one million population. Japan is right behind Fiji and Guyana. It's 153rd in the world. Can you believe that? I mean, Togo is higher. In the 21st century with a high tech country. Yeah, but that was government policy. They didn't think that take mass testing was the right thing to do because if they discovered people who were infected, they'd have to go to the hospital. I don't know. It's just a huge, a massive mistake, at least from my perspective. Yeah. So I think I sent you an article, Jay, that Softbank, the company itself, kind of in a vacuum, decided to do testing on its own of all of its employees and also 500 hospitals. So this was funded by them entirely by Sun, the guy who's the head of Softbank. It's quite incredible. So it's like private testing, private funding for testing, kind of in the shadow of Japan's lack of testing. And it produced incredible, important information that the government should have from the very beginning, but they don't because they don't test. So they found out that the positive rate was 0.43% of the 44,000 people that took the test. They tested dentists and the infection rate was very low. You would think it would be high there, but they found out the infection rate was low. They found that at the Softbank stores, the retail stores that sell the mobile phones and so forth, infection rate there was also very low. And you would think that that would be high. The highest infection rate was in the office. Even though 90% of their people were supposedly working at home, but that was the greatest, the highest incidence of infection was in the Softbank corporate offices. So that testing information came from Softbank. The government didn't do testing. And to the extent that they did, they didn't collect the data. So I mean, Sun is, you know, as a business person, his reputation has just gone into the crapper, right? Because of, you know, all the bad investments that his huge investment fund has made. But you have to admire him for stepping into the void here, the vacuum and actually doing this test and finding out information that can help actually form a more solid policy. I thought that was very interesting. That's innovation you were just talking about. Yeah. Well, maybe that maybe we'll catch on in the U.S. I don't know if that has happened to any significant degree in the U.S. If I were the CEO of a company, as you say, it happens in the office, people are close and they talk to each other, mask or not. And so, you know, it's got high risk. You know, if I were a CEO, I would spend some money trying to protect my staff and doing whatever I could do. I'd be all over distancing in masks. I'd be all over tracking if I got a case. All those things, the two all those good together. That just makes business sense, doesn't it? But what's the economic cost of a cluster infection? You know, in your Foucaoka office, all of a sudden there's 50 or 75 people that are sick. What's the impact? It'd be better to test in advance to try and avoid that. You discover that one individual and get them out before it becomes, you know, major business. That's just makes business sense to do that type of thing. So that's probably what drove him to do this testing on his own. You know, it's interesting that all these years, I mean, in our generation, Steve, is we've assumed the government handles things like this, but the government has effectively unlimited books to do the science, to understand about epidemics, to do the pharmaceuticals, to organize them. And at the industry, the pharmaceutical industry, Big Pharma, has been thinking about this too and will handle it or has handled it. And in the back room somewhere, there's millions of doses of medicines that can be the therapeutic or vaccine, but we've been disappointed, sorely disappointed, way behind the curve. And I think we've come to find that governments haven't done what we might have expected. And this... I might differ with you. It's the leadership. I mean, if you look at New Zealand or Taiwan, you can look to examples where the government was proactive when you had effective leadership. So I would agree with you. In Japan, the government at best has been middling in terms of their results. In America, it's a disaster. But that's a reflection of the leadership. If you had a different president in the United States, Jay, even if it was Clinton, who I'm not a big fan of, but let's say she was a president now, I think the repercussions from the virus would be much, much less than what you're experiencing now. I mean, that's my own personal opinion. If you had someone who could think proactively that took the disease seriously from the beginning and didn't say, oh, this is a hoax, or it's going to magically disappear. I mean, my goodness. How can you say that as a leader of a country? Well, you know, what's interesting is that it should be, and I guess with Biden, it largely is, a platform, a plank in the platform, not only this time, not only with coronavirus, but with public health in general. You know, I promise you, not only will I give you a good health plan, which, you know, Trump has undermined in every way he could, but I will take care of you. I will give you good health. I will bring the government online in every way I can to solve this problem and to protect you from epidemics of the same nature in the future. And if there was a candidate, and I hope Biden is saying that, who says that I would vote for that person, you know, without question, without any delay, because that is the existential threat now. It threatens the people in their lives, and it also threatens the economy. So I guess in the future, don't you think we will see at least in democracies or former democracies like the US, we will see people voting for platforms that include a healthy dose of public health, don't you think? I hope so. It's certainly long overdue. I mean, the United States is the only fully developed country that doesn't have national health care. Japan does. You know, and that's maybe one of the reasons why COVID infection rates are lower here. And the economic impact of not having insurance in America is devastating, and you don't have that issue here in Japan, fortunately. You know, there are problems with the Japanese health care system, but finances, money, pain for that is not one of them. That's eliminated, fortunately. So Steve, now the hard question. You and I will meet up again in two weeks. Yes. And the world will change, probably. But we're tracking on this. We're connecting the dots, and probably we'll have a resurgence in a number of places, and we'll have some government or pretense of government action. Can you give me a, like a, a praise sea of an expectation as even a speculation of what it's going to be like when we meet next? Oh my goodness. You want me to gaze into the, the murky crystal ball? As only professors can do. Yeah, that's true. We like doing that to normally. Well, I have to admit that even in my advanced years now, I still have optimistic instincts. And I would like to think that through this we'll begin to make some kind of progress. Like for example, in the United States, these protests, these young people that are out in the streets, they're, they're protesting ostensibly racial injustice. But I think my speculation is behind that is economic injustice too. And the fact that the corona virus and COVID has so clearly demonstrated how vastly imbalanced the United States is and to another extent Japan is as well. So I would hope that through the reforms that are beginning to kind of snowball in terms of police reform and so forth that economic reform and political reform will become part of that overall agenda. Now, two weeks, no, maybe that won't occur, but maybe longer term, I would like to believe that. Jay, you're, you're kind of smiling. You, you do not think that that's possible. Maybe I'm smiling because the Republicans in the Senate, the Republicans in the Senate are camping out on a bill for police reform. They're not doing anything about it. Right. And Trump is giving at best miss signals, more, more like no signals about doing anything about it. So I'd like to see it happen. I think a lot of people actually risk their lives and their health to go out in the street. And that shows you how ardent they are and how the issue is. Right. But we'll see. Let's remember this conversation two weeks hence and see how things evolve. It's the most interesting or combination of interesting questions of our time. Yes, absolutely. Always a pleasure, Jay. Always a pleasure, Steve. Thank you so much. They're coming out with custom masks now. Uniglo is producing their own that they call cool masks. I can get some for you, Jay. I'll send them to you. Okay. Okay. And I'll send you a link to the article in the Atlantic magazine. Okay, sounds good. You take care. Aloha. Thank you so much.