Monday, March 28, 2005

A MASK SEASON

▼ Perhaps people wear flu masks this year more than ever before. On such a fine, windy day that annoys people allergic to cedar pollens, I counted the number of mask users in the train and found out that one out of four commuters wore masks.

▼ People in foreign countries also suffer from hay fever, but in the springtime, streets are not overflowed with people in masks except for some Asian countries. A Japanese working in Washington, D.C. says, “I have never seen people in masks walking in the street.” Most drugstores in the United States do not sell masks. He told a colleague American suffering from hay fever to use a mask, but he declined to use, for he might be mistaken as a sufferer of serious communicable disease.

▼ “People do not force themselves to go to office with a mask on. If they give sneezes incessantly, they take a day off,” so said a Japanese in Germany. It is not common to see Londoners or Parisians wearing masks in public.

▼ Such being the case, a mask season in Japan makes timely news in Europe and America. Seeing a group of people in masks walking along the sidewalk, an American reporter said, “I though them a group of surgeons walking to an operating room.” An Australian newspaper made a report a few years ago that they were like a group of voters making a protest against the government in a mass.” Their descriptions are exaggerated but wearing masks must be so unusual to them.

▼ According to “Haku-juji”, a major sanitary goods company founded in 1896, the flu mask became popular in Japan around 1920 when Spanish influenza was rampant. Until then masks were used by factory workers to protect them from dust. It used to be oblong to cover the mouth, but at present it has a protruding shape to cover the whole from the nose to the chin.

▼ Lately in Europe and America, weathermen also report a “pollen forecast” in TV and newspapers. Doctors advise that wearing a mask is effective to ease the disease, but there is no immediate sign of using it among them.