Past Pandemics: A Reflection -- Yugo Konno

 One of the things that surprised me again throughout the class was that infectious diseases are not a thing of the past. We have experienced the Black Death, the Spanish flu, and cholera, and even with the development of medicine, infectious diseases itself have yet to be conquered by mankind.

Through the Covid-19 pandemic, I have made an interesting discovery in the thinking of people around the world. It is the contrast between liberalism, which focuses on the rights of the individual, and which focuses on the interests of the group. In many Western countries, especially in the United States, where the emphasize on individual rights, people strongly oppose and demonstrate against the Covid-19 measure if it restricts people's rights. In Japan, however, people do not seem to strongly oppose the government's policies even when their rights are restricted. One Japanese politician said that this is due to the quality of the Japanese people. However, I believe that the historical and cultural backgrounds are responsible for this event, not quality. Western countries have a background of citizens creating and acquiring human rights from absolute monarchies. On the other hand, Japanese citizens do not have the background of creating human rights. Japan has a similar background to the West in the sense that it adopted human rights from foreign countries in order to escape from totalitarianism, but this is a significant factor because it was not the Japanese people who created human rights. In addition, Japan was totalitarian in the 20th century, putting the interests of the group first. I guess that these are the causes of this problem.

This cannot be explained by a simple comparison of individualism and collectivism, because things are more complicated, for example, economic problem: the level of poverty due to inflation differ from country to country.