Someday when I look back on the entries of this blog I may wonder to myself what was happening with us during the start of the coronavirus in Japan, and so I thought I should write up a little about what’s been going on with our lives in these unusual times.
Even though there are some dramatic lifestyle changes all over the world, and some countries (including the USA) with a startling death toll, life for us has not significantly changed. I think the reason for this is likely a unique combination of circumstances for our work and lifestyle that were in place long before the coronavirus showed up.
As for work, I teach mainly one-on-one classes in a private classroom so I can avoid large crowds at work. I come face to face with my students and that’s it – between 4-8 people in one day. Similarly, Kuniko’s school is a correspondence school, and she rarely has to meet her students face to face, instead dealing with them over the internet. With the coronavirus they have added the option of doing remote work, so she has even less exposure by not commuting several times a week.
And Japan was already a country that sort of practices social distancing. Handshakes and hugs are rare, 70% of people outside wore masks already, and my guess is that number has moved up to around 90%. Things are clean, shoes (and whatever is on the bottom of them) are left at the doorstep, and people already wash their hands and gargle as a preventative step to colds and influenza – something that is taught to every Japanese student from elementary school age.
Certainly there have been changes. All public schools and most private ones are closed for now. Many retail shops are closed, although more are opening back up recently. Restaurants and bars are struggling and hoping that take-out orders and emergency government subsidies will be enough to sustain them until voluntary restrictions are lifted.
Big companies like mine are still open, and the use of remote work has increased tremendously, giving workers more flexibility but also giving them much more independence which may feel very foreign to some.
The real struggles going on are the ones that are not visible to most people. Companies in Japan both large and small have shifted over the past few decades away from the lifetime employment model towards a dispatch worker system. Many companies pay another kind of company, called a dispatch company or staffing company, to provide workers to do regular work. This gives the original company more flexibility in changing the workers, cutting them when business is slow, and reducing fixed costs in the long term. This trend was already bad news for the dispatched workers as job security was much lower, and until recently they would get paid less for doing the same work as lifetime contract employees.
So with many retail shops and restaurants closed these workers have less income, and they wait at home for a call from the dispatch company sending them somewhere if they are lucky. Some may have kids to take care of (since schools are closed) and so they struggle. I imagine many families are in this situation now, and it must be tough for them.
The sudden appearance of the coronavirus has been a particular challenge to the government of Japan. Leaders in Japan tend to take plenty of time to discuss things carefully, gather relevant data and analyze it, and then take cautious incremental steps towards overcoming a problem. This sort of approach seemed to be exactly the wrong tactic for something as fast-moving and evolving as Covid-19. Even under this pressure the pace of change is still slow, and I hope that lessons will be learned on the value of flexibility and speed. It isn’t fair to single out only the Japanese government here – many governments are struggling all over the world – but from my perspective the prime minister of Japan and his government’s resistance to making a concrete decision caused more confusion and problems than it should have.
But amidst all of this bad news, Kuniko and I found ourselves in a good place. At the start of February my company assigned someone to help me get a permanent residence visa. Until now when I had to renew my visa (every 3-5 years) it was all on me to go through the bureaucratic nightmare – taking time off to go get the forms from various government agencies, and then taking more time off to apply in person and more time off to pick up the visa once it was completed. This time I had someone to help me get the necessary documents, pay for all the forms, stamps, and application fees, and let me leave the office to take care of things myself when I needed to. At the end of February I received my permanent residency visa (with no expiration date!) and I have my company to thank for going to bat for me on this. I never asked them to help me but sometimes it is good to have a big bureaucratic machine working in your interests.
We’ve both got solid jobs, steady income, and with no kids and plenty of food and things to do at home it has been extremely easy for us. We are some of the lucky ones, at least for now, and so the best thing we can do is avoid taking our situation for granted, to do what we can to help others who need it, and to stay healthy. Of course there is still the possibility that people’s lives will continue to change, and we’ll try to be flexible enough to be ready for it when it does.
