I am obsessed with Japanese culture. I love how weird it is. How unique and quirky. Innovative and inventive. The majesty of sumo wrestling, the beauty of Mt. Fuji. The freedom of Otaku culture, the creativity of Manga. I love it all. Everything and anything from Anime to Zen Gardens.
But despite my love affair I have always been hesitant to learn Japanese, a famously difficult language to learn with over 50,000 Kanji or logographic characters from which to choose. But all that may be about to change. For me and everyone else. For speaking Japanese may actually limit the spread of COVID-19!
An article by Vice first raised the question:
“Maybe something about speaking the Japanese language produces less viral particles to pass onto others. In May, a clip from Japanese television started circulating on Twitter, garnering over 40,000 likes. It shows a woman saying, ‘This is a pen,’ first in Japanese, and then in English, with a white cloth hanging in front of her face. When the woman speaks English, the phrase causes the cloth to flap in the wind emitted from her mouth; when she speaks Japanese, it stays nearly entirely still.”
The article adds that:
“Two recent studies have found that normal talking can emit thousands of small particles that can linger in the air for over 10 minutes. And other recent work has found that different speech sounds produce more of these particles than others. For example, more particles are emitted by saying phrases that have a lot of vowels.
‘Saying eee releases more than saying ahhh,’ said William Ristenpart, a chemical engineer and an expert in transport phenomena at The University of California Davis. In a study by Ristenpart and his colleagues from January, they found that saying the phrase ‘The rainbow is a division of white,’ produces many more particles than ‘A sign from the gods to foretell war.'”
All of this may explain why Japan, especially Tokyo, with its crammed population, hasn’t experienced that severe of a coronavirus outbreak. Most people assumed that was because mask wearing was already an ingrained part of their culture, and, yes, that is likely to be a major mitigating factor. But the way in which Japanese is spoken may very well be another.
Is speaking Japanese to avoid spreading COVID-19 the Greatest Idea Ever?
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